I’m not a big fan of moe, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t give these types of series a chance. I’ve been proven wrong often enough times about these types of shows, and there are plenty of series that may look overly chichéd and stereotypical on the outside, yet turn out to be surprising gems on the inside. I was hoping Saki to be the same, and for a while it indeed looked like this was the case, but in the end it unfortunately ended up too much stuck in its own clichés and stereotypes to really develop into something worthwhile.

There are just too many fundamental problems with this series. This series is about Mah-Jong. In preparation for this series, you can clearly see that the creators read through all of the rules of Mah-Jong, they looked up all of the major strategies that can be used to win, but on the other hand it also becomes so obvious that they’ve never actually sat down to play a game, in order to get the feeling of how a game normally progresses.

And so, the matches in this series aren’t decided by strategy, but instead by pure luck. Matches basically revolve around who can pull the biggest Deus ex Machina near the end of every match. These magical powers enable the characters to cheat in all sorts of ways, like becoming invisible, getting extra luck when the rounds are arranged in a particular way, and even blatantly giving all of your opponent crappy hands so that you can do whatever you please. The creators don’t even make use of this. The matches all end in the most predictable ways, with no attempt whatsoever to spice them up beyond their original set-up (which is just a courtesy of the manga it’s based on anyway).

This would have all been forgiven if the characters made up for it. Unfortunately, there too it ultimately disappoints. This series has about thirty named characters, and nearly all of them just end up being one-dimensional clichés and stereotypes, with the few attempts that are made to develop them being the most predictable and clichéd attempts ever, so that doesn’t really help either.

In the end, there are just three characters that actually resemble characters and don’t exist based on their exaggerated quirks, and those are just a bunch of minor side-characters. They definitely manage to spice up the series when they’re in the focus, but they’re just too overshadowed by the lead characters, Saki and Nodoka who form one of the most obvious lesbian pairings I have ever seen. There’s nothing subtle about their romance at all. It’s just a constant onslaught of blushing and strange looks when these two are near each other.

But by far the worst character in this series has to be the only boy in the entire series. This guy is so incredibly obnoxious that he makes every scene he’s in a pain to sit through. His endless fantasies about Nodoka’s bosom just get worse and worse as time goes by, and overall he remains an utterly pointless character. There’s no reason whatsoever to have him in this series!

I recently (read: half an hour ago) realized that this series is quite similar to Yoku Wakaru Gendai Mahou: both series start out with a flawed premise of lots and lots of moe, seemingly stereotypical characters, magic and huge boobs. And that’s all the more of a shame that YWGM did end up creating something enjoyable with a tongue-in-the-cheek execution and fun chemistry, while Saki kept hanging with a bland and unimaginative execution that always picks the most predictable option to go forward. With one of the most obnoxious soundtracks of the season (I’m not the biggest fan of J-Pop, and it’s music like that that’s exactly the reason why!), it fails to move beyond mediocrity.

Okay, I was wrong last episode: Envy didn’t die, his arm just disintegrated. Should have known. Anyway, this was a pretty exciting episode with a lot of interesting twists. Ed and Lin spend the entire episode inside Gluttony’s “stomach”, along with Envy, but apart from that a lot more interesting stuff went on.

But oh my god, Envy’s true form. I’m not sure who exactly came up with the designs for that… thing, but I can’t seem to think of anything that resembles it. It also turns out that he was the one who triggered the war in Ishbal, which means that the Humonculi actually tried to get rid of Ishbal once. What exactly didn’t they want the Ishbal’s to find out? Does it have to do with the research of Scar’s brother?

Hawkeye also turns out to get reassigned to be the Fuhrer’s assistant, which is a very risky move. If he wanted to use her to find out who’s helping her, he could have just assigned her to one of his allies, and have this ally report to him so that they can later systematically eliminate all of them. Why would he want to put himself at such a risk? Is he that confident that Hawkeye isn’t going to cause a problem for him, or is there more behind it?

And to think that the headquarters of the Humonculi lies right in the middle of Central City. it makes sense, with Bradley in control, it’s a great place to hide out. It also makes me wonder: before Bradley was created was there someone else playing Fuhher?
Rating: ** (Excellent)

I do hope that the second half of this series is going to introduce some sort of challenge for Kou, because with this episode, it’s already getting boring to watch these matches in which Kou and Azuma dominate the entire game. I tried to like this series’ baseball matches, but in the end it’s really something that Touch did much, much better.

Now that we’re at the halfway point, it’s about time for Kou and Aoba’s relationship to develop again. In this episode, they again dropped various hints that they’re into each other, including Aoba at last getting impressed by Kou’s pitching-work, but we’ve reached the point at which it’s beginning to get repetitive. We need some more conflict to spice things up.

This episode finally gave us a good look at what may look like two promising rivals, but the creators still need to put a lot of time in them to flesh them out properly. At the moment they’re nothing really special yet.
Rating: (Enjoyable)

The first season of Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei was awesome. It had wit, and came across as a really fresh comedy-series. The second season also had a number of hilarious episodes, but at the same time lost its edge, became repetitive and turned stereotypical. Season three in its turn continued to sap away all creativity, turning it into a repetitive bore-fest. It’s the perfect example of why you shouldn’t milk out comedies.

At this point, Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei has really exhausted all of its good jokes. The first season had me laughing nearly continuously, while your average episode in this season only managed to generate a chuckle out of me once or twice if it was lucky. Episodes are yet again divided into three chapters, each looking at a different type of social commentary, but most of them are just rehashes of some previous chapter, without really adding anything new. The ones that aren’t ripped off are about such a ridiculously obscure part of society that it’s hard to care about them.

The characters aren’t better off. On top of the fact that they still haven’t changed beyond their stereotypes, this season also gives a lot of them some sort of obnoxious catch-phrase that they tend to repeat in nearly every single episodes. There’s the psycho girl with her periods and commas that appear on the screen, the stalker girl with her “you were there? Always”, the foreign girl with her pantyshots, the hikkikomori with her fanservice and the fangirl with her fantasies. On top of that, every episode starts with a nonsensical audio story that just pointlessly goes on and on, and every episode ends with an even more obnoxious drawing game that already got old in the second season.

Granted, the better episodes of this series are near the end, and I have to agree that the cavemen part was pretty funny, but that in no way makes up for the rest of the series. If you’re interested in this series, watch up to episode 6 of the second season. Beyond that, it only gets worse. Still, at least the graphics in this series look as good as ever. The direction and character-designs make this series nice to look at (unlike that other Shaft-show, but more on that once it finishes), but in a season with so many other good comedies, this stands out as an incredibly repetitive series that was already milked out ages ago.