Okay, so now that this series has also delved into baseball for all-female teams, I just can’t help but hijack a part of this post for some comparisons on that other baseball show that’s airing this season: Taishou Yakyuu Musume, because this episode pretty blew all of its focus on baseball away.

In a way, Taishou Yakyuu Musume and Cross Game are quite similar: both are slice of life series at heart, with a bunch of characters who just happen to play baseball. TYM plays in the 1920s, while Cross Game takes place in what I guess are the 1980s (due to the lack of PCs anywhere…), and both are feminist in their own ways, without shoving “women rock” down the viewer’s throats.

TYM has one advantage over Cross Game: none of the characters are naturally born talents, destined to be among the nation’s best baseball players. Instead, what keeps the team together is the passion of the central characters to make the team they compiled together, and show that girls can just as easily do sports that were meant for guys.

But yeah, Cross Game pretty much owns it in every single way in terms of development. I’m still not sure how the girls of TYM became this good at baseball within only one year of training, considering how they started with absolutely nothing. Cross Game meanwhile first establishes its characters as people with extraordinary talents and then develops them utterly flawlessly.

This episode really had the best baseball match of the series for me so far: we know that Aoba is extraordinary talented, and she worked hard to hone her talents all through her childhood. And yet this episode showed that she’s not alone, and even though she’s able to bring an entire team together and significantly improve its performance, this episode really showed that there are many other different kinds of talented players out there.

I remember how Major also tried to do this, but instead of creating formidable foes, it instead came with a bunch of shounen-esque villains: a bunch of one-trick ponies who only had one thing they were good at and that’s it. And in that way, Taishou Yakyuu Musume does shine: even though it has lots of characters, it does care for its characterization and uses its limited time to move its characters away from their stereotypes, instead of the overblown melodrama that turned me off at Major, where I really didn’t like the overly cheesy drama.

Anyway, long story short: this episode rocked. TYM pales in comparison, but still is pretty nice slice of life.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

I have a question for the people who have been keeping up with the latest episodes of Gintama. As some of you may know, I’ve been keeping up with Rumbel’s subs for the series. Now that Horriblesubs have released the final missing episodes between Rumbel’s and the start of Crunchyroll’s, I decided to slowly marathon up to the latest episodes. Right now, I have just finished episode 124 and am seriously considering to drop the series altogether.

My question to you is: is Gintama really going to improve?

Because seriously, my patience at this point has entirely run out. I have heard that around episode 140, this series gets serious again with a bunch of good episodes around Kagura’s past, but is that really going to be worth it if the creators are going to delve into boring fillers again? Is it really going to be worth it, watching a dozen episodes, just to get to one good one?

Ever since the new director took over at episode 101 for me, this series has lost all of its charms, but I had faith in the series, hoping that it might pick itself back up. However, then I reached episode 120, which was the funniest episode ever since this guy took over. So what was the best joke in that episode? A rip-off of one of the best jokes of the first director. It was at this point that I realized that it was getting pointless to watch this series.

I truly rate the first 100 episodes among the top comedies I have ever seen. Sure, it also did have its share of weak episodes, but those were vastly outnumbered by the number of awesome and really well written episodes. The new director however just failed to live up to it in every single way. The penis jokes for example have become way too obvious, and that’s just the tip of the ice-berg.

Another pet peeves of the new director is that he tries to stuff in as much references to other shounen series as possible. I’m always in for a good parody, but that’s the problem: instead of parodying, the new director is simply listing a bunch of references without making fun of them. After a while this becomes really, really boring.

Then there’s also the matter of the increase of lengthy arcs. In the first 100 episodes, the only arcs that took up more than 2 episodes were the ones that mattered: the ones that developed the characters and made optimal use of their length. Right now the long arcs are just dragging on beyond belief, often wasting entire episodes with things that can be solved within only 10 minutes. The biggest example of this are episodes 121, 122 and 123: what the heck was the point in dragging this on for three episodes? The entire story would have fit into just a half of an episode, and instead it became an utterly predictable bore-fest that just would not end.

A more fundamental problem however is that the quality of the script-writing has gone down a lot. The first 100 episodes were really good at tugging at my heart-strings, not through its characters, but because of its subtle writing that knew exactly what to say. Especially the long monologues of the characters were deep, meaningful and really got the best out of the characters in the serious moments. That’s completely gone now as well. The dialogue has become uninspired, cheap, and way too much focused on over the top violence in an attempt to make up.

I’m really beginning to feel that I’m just watching the show for the heck of it, which is a shame because there are many better shows at the moment that I’d rather spend my attention at. In the end, there really seems to be a curse on shounen series that go beyond the 100 episode mark: Dragonball Z would have been fine if it just ended after 26 episodes; it would have been a nice action series that way. Naruto was pretty much a good series until the start of the final Chuunin Examinations, after which it dragged its story on and on beyond belief. Bleach was also a very entertaining shounen series for its first 30 episodes… until it descended into a bunch of boring and predictable fights around the Ichigo the Marty Stu. Gintama lasted longer than the others, but in the end, my enthusiasm for the first 100 episodes is just completely gone at this point.

So yeah, if I do end up dropping it (which is pretty likely at this point), what do you want me to do? Write a review about just the first 100 episodes, or is that review not really necessary?