Another excellent episode, aside from the parts that focused on Winry. You know, I understand what purpose she has: keeping Ed and Al down to earth. The thing is that she just keeps hogging up too much screen-time even though she’s mostly unrelated to the story. Especially since the creators are pulling this series at a high pace, cutting several scenes along the way, and yet they seem to refuse to want to cut any of her airtime. It’s a good thing that she’s returned to the Auto-mail City. That’s also going to enable her to grow as a character.

Anyway, this episode really showed Lin and Lan Fan’s abilities, both as thinkers as as fighters. I really expected this fight to end with both parties simply retreating, what seems to be the trend in a lot of other series with lots of fighting, but Lin actually succeeds in not only capturing Gluttony, but he also manages to trick Wrath at the same time. Lan Fan cutting off her own arm… that just shows how well she must have been trained and how deep her devotion is. I personally can hardly imagine how one would be crazy enough to successfully cut off one’s own arm, but if the alternative is death…

But at the same time, Hawk did make the mistake of using a bit too obvious of a disguise. Anyone who works for the military who has worked with her could have seen through her, which is especially risky since they’re suspecting King Bradley to have something to do with her. Interesting subversion of the “Sailor Moon”-syndrome, though.

Anyway, that little girl that was with Scar finally comes in action. I have no idea who she is, how old she is, why she’s helping Scar and how she became so incredibly good at alchemy despite being just a child, but she seems to be someone to look out for.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

I’d like again to hijack this post for a bit to post up some impressions of the past half year of anime. Now that most of the series of the past Spring and Summer Season are about to end, it’s time to reflect on them again, and how they matched up to previous years. My general impression of the past Spring and Summer Season is that they’ve been completely different from those a year ago.

The spring season of 2008 was all about fooling the viewer: making the viewer think that the focus of the series will be on something completely different from what it actually is, and this air that you never know what to expect of an arc or episode, for the good and the bad. This spring and summer however, have instead been about consistency: delivering, and doing so over and over. Even the series which focused on surprising did so consistently.

Because of this, there’s no way to say “Spring 2008 was weaker/better than Spring 2009″. The individual highlights of the Spring and Summer of 2008 were better than of the current season. As much as I like Tokyo Magnitude, Phantom, Shangri-La and the Guin Saga, their highlights simply don’t match up to Kaiba, Himitsu ~The Revelation~, xxxHolic and Amatsuki. However, at the same time I have a lot less to get angry about this season: 2008 had a lot of disappointments, and series that ended with a bitter taste for me (*ahem*, Allison to Lillia, Soul Eater, Macross Frontier, Mission-E, Nijuu Mensou no Musume, et cetera, et cetera). The current season of course has shows with a lot of flaws, but you could have seen all of them coming. I’ve watched 30 episodes this season, and only one of them was offensively dull (Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei), and the good series have really been consistently good, with hardly any weeks that didn’t deliver.

The reason why I’m hijacking this post of all things to write this down is because I’ve had this strange feeling that something was missing this season, and now I finally know what it is. The biggest reason why the Spring and Summer of 2008 were so inconsistent was that they featured a lot of case-based series: in them, characters either had jobs that involved meeting lots of different people, travelled around, or just met different people, allowing these people to tell their stories. while episodic and fillerish at first sight, it resulted into a number of amazing and really well written episodes, and because of that I’ve become a really big fan of those sorts of series.

to my surprise, the past half year only featured one such series: Bakemonogatari. And that one turned out disappointing for a whole set of reasons involving Shinbo. Guin Saga and Tokyo Magnitude may seem like it, but the people that the main characters run into don’t really get an in-depth look, and their main purpose is instead to bring the setting alive, rather than standing out as a character with depth. And really, while there are a lot of very enjoyable series currently airing, I’m missing these quick series in which you never know what to expect. It’s those kinds of series that I’m going to look for especially in the upcoming fall season.

Anyway, to segue back into this episode, the epitome of consistency this season is of course Cross Game. This episode shows the first matches of the local tournaments, that will eventually lead to Koshien. However, I KNOW Adachi: Kou isn’t in his final year yet, so they’re going to lose at some point. The question is: when?

I liked how this episode also subverted a very common trope: “prettyboys are awesome”. This episode really proved that that isn’t necessarily the case, and it’s really good to see a group of people with normal looks in the centre, rather than a bunch of bishies or overly moe girls in the spotlights.

Other events in this episode showed a small glimpse of what happened to the members of previous year’s baseball team. They’ve all picked themselves back up in other teams, including Miki who’s looking much more healthy. This episode also marks what would have been Wakaba’s birthday, so Kou is out to collect another birthday gift for her.

One thing I didn’t like about this episode is that it was a bit too un-subtle about the Kou vs Aoba relationship. Especially the point in which Aoba looks at the camera and a soft wind conveniently starts blowing… that could have been done more subtle.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Well, so that’s it for this season. Anime News Network reports that the second airing of Haruhi is only going to take up 28 episodes. Since there now have been fourteen episodes of the second season aired, a quick bit of math shows that the final episodes are going to be the ones that were left over from the first season.

Anyway, the “Second Season” of Haruhi is a bit of a misleading title. It’s not really a sequel, but rather a collection of episodes that fit in between the episodes of the first season, with the purpose to flesh out the cast a bit more. It consists out of three arcs: the Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody, Endless Eight and the Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya.

The Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody is pretty nice. It’s a bit of backstory for the lead character Haruhi, which is of course always welcome. It just takes up one episode, and is pretty enjoyable. Endless Eight on the contrary takes up a whopping eight episodes, and basically consist out of the same episode repeated again and again and again, just with the animation and voice-work redone. However, these episodes can be easily skipped: only the first and the last matter, while the middle ones are still a nice enough slice of life to watch in those cases when you’re really, really bored.

My main problem with this series came at the start of the Sigh of Haruhi, though. One of my main complaints with the first season already was that Haruhi was incredibly annoying, and she really proves that again in this arc. The arc is also way too long, so her ramblings just go on and on and on. The rest of the cast could have made up for it, but during this arc they acted way too much like the stereotypes they avoided so well throughout the first season: Kyon becomes continuously horny for Mikuru, Mikuru continuously becomes a crybaby, Tsuruya is hyperactive and weird 100% of the time. I mean come on, give us some subtlety here!

Thankfully, the arc closes off with the best two episodes of the second season. The semi-final episode made a very good point, and the final episode finally shows that the scriptwriters put in some effort again, returning the series back to its former subtlety.

Overall though, the first season simply is better than the second. Not only did the second merely function to flesh out the characters, but you can also see that less effort was put into it. A lot of the episodes lack the detailed dialogue of the first season, and the animation, while still rich and detailed, suddenly started looking way too much like K-On and Kyoani’s other moe shows during the climaxes. Seriously, the characters for this series were already moe enough; you really don’t have to add even more to it…

The first season, while it also definitely had its annoying parts in the episodic fillers, did have its excellent first arc. but the second season has a lot less episodes that really deliver. Nevertheless, I really doubt that this is going to be the last of this series, and the second season nevertheless was a pretty decent slice of life series. I still like that Kyoani, during this time of an economic crisis, still is willing to try out daring concepts. At least, in some of their shows… Yes Munto, I’m looking at you.