I love how this show at first sight can make it seem that an episode isn’t really going to contribute to the plot, and yet time and time again it proves you wrong. Every single episode, although slow, has contributed to the plot and none of them have felt wasted. This episode too: I first thought that it was going to be a strange filler in which Kou and Aoba’s families spend the Christmas Vacation at some sort of a spa resort. I was wrong.

It turns out that they were invited to the place at which Aoba’s grandparents live. They used to play there during summer vacations when Wakaba was still alive, so this was an entire episode stuffed with nostalgia for both Kou and Aoba. And finally we get the first direct and solid clues that they’re into each other! Hah!

For both of them this becomes clear through jealousy: Aoba really gets jealous looking at an old book of photos in which Kou and Wakaba are really close to each other. Kou on the other hand gets in trouble when an old childhood friend of Wakaba shows up, and suddenly gets Aoba to smile like she never showed at all. Since we’re talking about Adachi here, it’s very likely going to take some more ages for both of them to realize this, but I really wonder how he’s going to let this play out. Especially since the new guy looks like that second pitcher of Touch whose name I can’t remember, and he turned out to be a challenge for Tatsuya to overcome for completely different reasons. What especially surprised me about him was how Aoba totally didn’t act tsundere when she met him.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Ontama!

Short Synopsis: Our lead character meets a strange fairy who’s going to help her overcome the problems in her family.
Potential for the Future: 2/10 (Could be a serviceable comedy, but nothing more)
Okay, so I used to do my first impressions in batches of three, but I’ve now reached the point at which this system has lead to just too many problems, so for the upcoming Fall Season I’m going to do it in a different way, and even though we’re not even halfway through the Summer Season, Ontama’s first episode that just got released sounds like a good way to experiment. My idea is to just basically create a single post for every new show that airs. Obviously, the potential problem with this system is that it’s going to lead to waves of posts during each season, so let me know when the amount of posts becomes just too big. I’ve also stopped rating these episodes, and instead I’ll just be looking at the potential they create: there are plenty of awesome series with dull first episodes, and in the same way there are also a lot of series with great first episodes that only dull in afterwards.

Anyway, Ontama is a rather childish show about a girl whose original parents are divorced and her mother remarried to a guy who’s rather nasty towards her. So she meets a fairy (this time in the form of a stuffed bear) who takes her back to right before she was born so that she could meet her real father. I must say that I’m surprised at the creativity of this scenario and there are some nice ideas, but the presentation is just mediocre in every way. There are some moderately funny jokes, but the lead character is just too stereotypically hyperactive and will probably get annoying very soon. The animal side-kick of this show also listens to every stereotype and doesn’t have anything original to it, and this episode was also full of nude jokes. You might like this if you like energetic yet brainless series, but other than that I don’t see much money in it.

Oh my god… this was seriously the best episode I have ever seen from Full Metal Alchemist. No question possible. I knew that we could expect fight scenes in this episode, but that it would be this intense, and that it would push the plot into that kind of direction… And to think that nearly the entire episode lacked any sort of presence from Ed, who is supposed to be the main character here.

It was this episode in which the Homunculi made their move on Roy Mustang and the others, in an attempt to spread the knowledge of them from flowing out, but they failed miserably there. Gluttony first fails when Roy finally shows himself as the leader of the investigation behind them, and Lust even gets as far as killed!

But to think that the homunculi in this series are created with Philosopher’s Stones! Now there’s something that I never saw coming, especially considering how the first series had them all going desperate to find them. And to think that they all have the power to regenerate. Those Homunculi sure are on a much different level than they were in the first season, in which they were about evenly matched with Ed, of all people!

And damn. That fight against lust was absolutely beautifully animated. It because an incredibly intense fight due to the amazing animation direction that made just about every frame a visual feast, especially when she was about to die. Seriously, Bones is on fire this season.

I now understand why Full Metal Alchemist is considered as such a great series: both the good guys as the bad guys pull absolutely no punches and are in no single way incompetent or naive, unlike nearly every other anime you see nowadays. That really makes seeing these behemoths going up against each other a scene to behold.

And yeah, Barry gets the award for most pathetic death I’ve seen in quite a while. There’s really something ironic about getting killed by your own body like that. And it’s a bloody shame that he’s gone now. As for the others, they’re probably still alive since we never saw their deaths, though I imagine them to be badly wounded. Al’s role in all of this was also pretty small, but he too made a lot of impact in this episode when he returned to Winry in the end.

Speaking of which… Hohenheim finally made his entrance! I can’t wait to see what his role is in this series. Especially considering how his older clone is the leader of the Humonculi.
Rating: *** (Awesome)