As if this series didn’t already have enough characters, this episode introduces even more of them! Is that a bad thing? Not really. It really goes along with the notion that you can really meet a lot of people at school, rather than only talk to four or five people and ignore just about everyone else like what you see in most anime. Anyway, this episode was about exhibitions, in which the lead cast visits two art exhibitions. And really, there was lots and lots of dialogue this time, including some pretty in-depth stuff about art…

But first the episode plays around with perspectives a bit. First we switch to the Art Club, who had to make a large drawing assignment that consists out of several sheets taped together. Awara and some mysterious new character created a surprisingly convincing drawing of a corridor which took me a few seconds to realize that it was actually drawn. You have to love how this series makes use of the fact that it’s an anime.

The rest of the episode is about the members of the Art Design, which carries further on the Trompe L’oeil technique that plays around with optical illusions (on a side-note, I keep getting surprised at how bad the Japanese meshes with French… if you thought Engrish was bad, try listening to a Japanese who’s trying to read something French…). Anyway, Miyabi comes with a bunch of examples of this, for example a painting of someone looking at a painting, or a painting of a corridor.

Then comes another new character named Yoshikawa, who seems to have invited Miyabi to a visit to an exhibition, and the rest of the club tags along with them. I’m not knowledgeable about paintings, so I unfortunately can’t name all of the famous works that they run into, but the topic then becomes realism in art, which then thanks to Tomokane then switches over to nudity in art, which was prevalent even in the Greek and Mesopotamian eras, since the nude skin was supposed to be closest to the gods. Over the years as art started to evolve, it seems that these paintings became more and more human and nothing like God, so the need to show skin also dropped.

Anyway, it seems that Yoshikawa and her classmates also contributed in the exhibition, and her work seems to be something abstract, with a bunch of cubes and white stripes. Since it’s quite a big painting, Namiko wonders how she carried it to and from the exhibition, and that turns out to have been the reason why she invited Miyabi, to help her carry such a big thing in public.

The next subject is about touching paintings, presumably to confirm whether or not they’re real (if I understood correctly) and Tomokane comes up with the rather silly theory that they forbid people to touch paintings because of secret holes and passageways that lie behind them. All she can find with the picture in question is a bunch of strange Chinese seals…

Yamaguchi meanwhile wandered off in her own world, even when Yoshikawa tried to call her out. She then becomes a bit embarrassed over her fascination over paintings, but the others reassure her that it’s nothing to be worried about. When they’re about to leave, Yoshikawa then shows Yamaguchi one final thing, which brings us back to the Trompe l’Oeil when Yoshikawa ends up tricking everyone while she makes it seem that Yoshikawa suddenly has been swallowed by a painting. I’d love to see such a thing in real life, by the way.

In the second half we suddenly get greeted by Noda with a different hairstyle (took me a while to figure out), who laments the fact that she really doesn’t know much about famous artworks when her mother asked her about it. Because of that, Yamaguchi suggests to visit another exhibition, this time with professional art.

Yamaguchi and Noda nearly get distracted by the kids’ zone (bunnies!), before they enter the real exhibition. In there, Noda progresses through the paintings in a much faster way than everyone else, so Yamaguchi questions whether she’s actually looking at them. What follows is a great joke in which Noda notices that she could have gotten one of those headphones that explains each painting, so in order to make up for it Miyabi borrows Tomokane’s headphones and narrates for her. :P

Kisaragi then runs into a picture that she once saw before in a house of an uncle of hers. They then run into a bunch of pictures that may look impressive, but they figure that they also could have made them themselves. They then continue to give their impressions (as in live, not painted) of famous artworks, like The Thinker, Michelangelo’s Pieta, three sculptures of three people who all are surprisingly similar to each other, Manet’s Young Flautist, The Scream and Raphael.

Next up they meet Usami, who is quite surprised to find out that students are visiting a museum. They talk a bit and then say goodbye, after which they, intimidated by all the quality works of art, inspire themselves a bit by the children’s corner. They then meet Takuma, who also happened to be there.

Okay, so today I got the inspired idea to watch and review this episode late at night… which may not have been the best idea ever… This is one of these series that needs to be watched in broad daylight, not at midnight.

Anyway, despite this we had another fun episode this time, I especially liked the idea of Trompe l’Oeil and the illusions they create. A problem with a lot of comedies for me is that when they stop being funny, they get really dull if they don’t have anything else to offer. GA solves this wonderfully when it has both the slice of life and the attention to art to keep itself interesting when it’s not funny, and because of this I’m not watching this show just to get to the next good joke, like what I notice with most comedies.
Rating: * (Good)

And so the finale for this series has begun. This episode was mostly building up, but as usual with this series it came with tons of revelations. And heck; the creators might actually be able to pull of a satisfying conclusion at this rate.

I’m glad to see that even though we’re nearly at the end, the creators still show a bit of what happened to the folks of Duomo after they were evacuated inside Atlas. With this, Kuniko also got her wishes through that every last bit of space in Atlas would be used for the people, rather than simply letting them be wastes of space.

In this episode something that rather gets in the way of my “Kunihito is Kuniko’s brother”-theory, when some actual romance starts to develop. Thankfully though, there wasn’t a lot of cheese among the two and the situations that made them realize their crush was pretty creative (Come on, Kuniko hugging Kunihito when she tried to find out where the sudden lights came from was really cute). It’s a bit disturbing though, because aside from the blushes, their “lover’s quarrel” looked more like the fights that siblings would have, rather than lovers.

And then the pattern with Atlas in the middle. It turns out that it was supposed to be the whole pillar that would make Atlas the most influential city of the world. When Nagiko and Sergei was younger, this was their motivation to construct Atlas. It was an attempt to escape earthquakes, but it failed. That’s why they created the Hiruko: young sacrifices that would end up stopping the effects of the earth on Atlas, and which is also what killed Takehito’s sister.

In the meantime Karin (apparently Akihabara was spared in the bombings) has been stalking Kunihito with her subordinates, and so obtained the final dagger. Apparently, this is going to make Mikuni the true heir of Atlas (so that’s what was the purpose of these daggers). Medusa in the meantime is getting rather out of control, though Karin realizes it a bit too late when it’s already planning to crash the entire market through Antarctica. Now that’s going to be the turning point for her wealth, it seems.

The whole deal around Titan confused me a bit, especially since we never actually get to SEE it, but we’re very much given the impression that it’s an aerial fortress of Titan came to Tokyo after Ryouko tipped them off that the person behind Medusa is in Akihabara. Because of this, it launches a pillar of light at Karin. She probably hasn’t died yet, because we’ve yet to see her actually die, but someone else did die: Hiruko, aka Miiko. WTF.

So wait… Ryouko actually meant to kill Hiruko?! And we only just learned that it’s Hiruko that prevents Atlas from collapsing under its own weight. What the hell could her purpose be? I mean, if she wanted to crash Atlas, couldn’t she just have used a bunch of explosives? With this however, the finale has really been set up. I have no idea what’s going to happen to Atlas right now, but it’s definitely setting up for some sort of grand finale.

I’m also really glad to see that at this point, the budget still hasn’t run out. The final scenes, in which Miiko showed her last moments, were really well drawn and they looked absolutely beautiful. It’d be awesome if Gonzo is saving the last remains of its budget to go all out on that final episode.

With four episodes left, this series has a lot cut out for it, but if it manages to do everything right, then this finale is going to rock. Right now, it really seems like Ryouko is going to be the final villain. She might or might not be planning to use Titan for the final episodes, but it’s now clear that she’s really planning something that really shouldn’t be allowed to happen, and four episodes seem just about right to flesh it out enough, after all the build-up that she’s received up till now. Karin and Kuniko are probably going to form the centre of her opponents. And also, what’s the carbon trade going to do in the final episodes? Is the market really going to crash, or will Karin be able to salvage enough of her money to set up a small army?
Rating: ** (Excellent)

I went into this series quite a false assumption of what it was going to be about. With a title as “Yugo the Negotiator”, it sounded like a mature and realistic series in which the lead character Yugo would calmly negotiate himself through various circumstances. Little did I know that this is a series which tests the boundaries of what the human body can take, a series which tests the boundaries of credibility in its plot twists and a series which tests the boundaries of how much tension you can insert in a story with such a dull sounding premise.

So yeah, this series features two arcs, both of which are about Yugo trying to rescue a person who has been captured by really dangerous people. The key in is success is investigation: he always carefully checks the background of the people he’s dealing with and you can also see that the creators of this series have taken their time to give a very detailed portrayal of the countries that this series is set in (Pakistan and Russia). With such a detailed setting, you’d really expect that the rest of the series is also going to be very realistic and believable, but unfortunately the rest of the plot is really shoddy, ludicrous and often loses focus of what’s really important.

In the end, while it had a lot of potential, Yugo the Negotiator to me stands out as one of those series with an identity crisis. Its focus should have been the negotiating: getting hostages away from danger, but quite a few episodes are simply dragging Yugo’s body to hell and back: we see him being tortured by 50 degrees of heat, minus forty degrees of cold and some other of Russia’s cruelest torture techniques. And while this would have been fine on its own, it gets a bit hard to believe to simply see him stand up and walk away afterwards like nothing happened.

The ending of the series also carries this air that you just can’t take seriously, in which just about every plot twist in the final two episodes stretches the limit of suspense of disbelief. Add to that the mysterious reason why the creators have Yugo team up with a sexy woman who falls in love with him but is generally useless to the plot and the fact that most of Yugo’s plans leave an awful lot to a very flimsy lady fortuna and you have a series that simply fails at being credible.

However, don’t get me wrong in that there’s nothing to get from this series, because it is a very intense ride from start to finish. If you can accept the fact that there is no way that this show is ever going to make any iota of sense, then you’ll be thoroughly entertained by all of the different and creative twists and turns that the plot makes and the horrible things that the characters have to go through. In terms of storytelling, it fails; but in terms of entertainment it definitely isn’t a bad way to spend 6 hours.

So yeah, in the end Yugo is pretty much the epitome of a Marty Stu. The plot often doesn’t make any sense, but if you set your mind on zero you’ll be fine with this series. It has enough to offer to keep people in for an intense ride throughout the 13 episodes, but really… do not take it seriously.