Again we focus on a random kid, and again it’s not a total waste of time at all. Note how this episode revisited some of the previous victims, showing that they’re still alive. That’s rare, even among the good episodic mahou shoujo. This episode also showed a bit more about that mysterious guy, who against my expectations might not be the student council president. This episode also made sure that the battles aren’t going to end up incredibly repetitive by revealing the powers of these mysterious heart seed as sources of random powers. With a bit of creativity this can lead to pretty nice action scenes.

We’ve often seen school photographers in anime. Her story wasn’t as good as last week’s, but it still was well thought out: it’s not exactly like she was feeling down because she was terrible at making photos: she had the right intentions, however by capturing people’s accidents she just carried out her hobby in a bit of a wrong way.

This episode again was great on the visual expressions of the characters. Also, take a look at the student council president’s aikido: that’s not just good animation, but you can actually see that the animators spend time at studying how to perform these techniques. They’re all just hints at how much effort they’re putting into the production of this series. I’m also not sure for how long this is going to continue, but this episode introduced yet another transformation scene. Weren’t these scenes originally intended as a means of laziness? :P
Rating: * (Good)

I keep advocating series, even slice of life series, to focus on adults. This episode showed one of the reasons why: alcohol. The drinking party has got to be my favourite arc of of Hanamaru Youchien yet. It’s episodes like these that aren’t just hilarious. They also show interesting new stuff about the characters.

Overall, this is something that I never expected at this series’ halfway point: ever since then, this series has just been getting better and better. Especially the past two episodes made up for the lackluster middle part. The great part is that Tsuchida is evolving. This guy really is your average loser done right, and it’s amazing to see what a little characterization can do. Despite the predictability of everything, I’m noticing that I’m actually feeling sorry for this guy, and like his colleagues would support these two getting together. That’s something I never really expected after finding out how incredibly dense Yamamoto was.

As for the brother: my first reaction when I saw him was: “god, not another one…”. And yet even the first half of this episode was great to watch. It’s a very interesting idea: a homage of such an overused thing as a school festival. That little part of drama was also surprisingly good: it’s just like a real kid for her to break down with so much pressure on her. That story ended up being a very nice story about family.

And then the ED, which also was among the best that this series has shown so far. I loved how the visuals and the music had completely different themes. I know that I often criticized this series when blogging it, but at this point, I’m glad that I picked it up. It’s nice and refreshing to blog something like this. It’s a great example of a series that actually redeems itself after a number of weak episodes.
Rating: *** (Awesome)

With this episode you can really see that the pacing has slowed down: an entire episode was dedicated to just one fight, save from two or three scenes about Mustang. It makes you wonder: did the creators at the start of this series know how many series they were going to have to work with? Or did they intentionally rush the first half of this series, in order to give the finale ample time to play out? It’s refreshing to see though: most endings of long series are rushed, but by the looks of it this series is going to get all of the time it needs.

In any case, for the supposedly “strongest homunculus”, Pride looked pretty pathetic in this episode at first, when he couldn’t even beat Ed. Wouldn’t it just be easy to surround Ed with his powers and strike him from multiple sides? It looks to me that while Pride may have the most convenient ability, he’s also quite uninventive, and instead had to actually eat Gluttony in order to gain the upper hand. It’s probably because he’s not used to these “cleanup” duties, which seem to have been part of Lust and Envy’s role, when they were still alive/free.

I thought that Wrath would be back for revenge quite quickly, but surprisingly he’s hiding somewhere. This series has been quite skillful in having characters carry out their own agenda when they’re not on the screen, so who knows what he’s been up to.
Rating: * (Good)

Well, so this is the episode I’ve been fearing for twenty episodes now: the match against Ryuoh. And unfortunately, while the previous matches were surprisingly good, this one… wasn’t. During the previous matches, you could really see that Adachi did a ton of stuff to spice them up. This one however, was different.

It’s very straightforward: Kou keeps hitting everyone out, apart from that cleanup hitter. The enemy pitcher meanwhile also hits everyone out. And then, when a person has made it onto a base, the team slips up and lets a point go. Nearly every baseball series has them: the match against the supposed best of the best, in which the stakes are highest. This is where Touch did a far better job.

As for the good stuff: Akaishi. I mean, the entire series has been building up to the fact that he would redeem himself in this episode (in the same way that Kou is bound to hit 160km/h in the next one…), but nevertheless it did allow him to develop. Even though he hit a home-run before, in this episode he really was able to let his worries go when he celebrated the point. Asami back home also was great to watch.

In any case, I really hope that the next episode will close off the game quickly, so that there’s as much time as possible for the series to go back to the slice of life, and conclude itself.
Rating: (Enjoyable)

This episode was pretty much everything that is Cobra in a nutshell: evil organizations, fighting bad guys, stealth, jails, exotic locations, gunfights, treasure hunts, bloodsport, hot chicks (FOR ONCE not teenagers), charismatic crooks. And of course the psychogun. The infiltration of the base of the slave market just screamed Cobra, and it’s interesting that this episode was so enjoyable, while completely staying true to itself.

A neat idea in this episode was that machine that would display the aura of the people fighting in the arena. It’s a nice subversion to the Dragonball Z-esque spontaneous auras that you often see in a lot of fantasy shows. Having it actually explained a bit makes it look actually cool.

Shiva’s castle also brings back a theme that has been used in many stories throughout the entire Cobra 2010 series: greed. Here we again have an array of side-characters, lusting for a supposedly awesome treasure. Now, the question is Cobra’s role in all of this. Why is he doing it? What event in his past has to do with all of this?
Rating: * (Good)

This episode was surprisingly darker than what we’ve seen of this series so far. It’s still a typical Letter Bee episode, with Lag crying, misguided villains and Gaichuu fighting, but some parts were surprisingly heavy.

The thing is, that most of the time in series about kids, bad guys tend to underestimate those kids, and go easy on them, allowing the kids to easily overpower the adults with whatever God-mode beam they have.
Letter Bee too has its share of God-mode Beams: the shindan. However, the adults around them have no pity for them whatsoever. As an anti-government
town, they hate everything that has to do with it, and even tried to feed a bunch of kids to a huge monster. It’s happened more often that kids are put into such ridiculous situations, but thanks to the build-up of the rest of this series, this was actually one of those cases in which I bought it.

As for the “one unable to become a spirit”, we’re still not exactly sure what those are, but Nichi seems to be one, strangely enough. At first I thought that they simply meant that they’re unable to become ghosts, but a “seirei” doesn’t seem to be often associated with humans. In any case, they seem to be so wanted that people are trying to create fake ones by performing surgery on them. Now where do they get those arms from in the first place, and what would be the point in creating them?

The episode closed off with a bit of a deus ex machina, though. What was Zazie doing there, appearing just at the right moment?
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Okay, so it might be a bit pointless to write a review about a show whose next season is going to air in a week or two, but who cares? Comedy sequels very often suffer from a lack of quality, whether it’s from a lack of inspiration, a burn out of the best jokes, or simply from trying too hard, it’s rare to run into a comedy that’s as good as its original. Hetalia however, is one such series. It’s not the best comedy out there by far, but it knows what it is: bite-size chunks of international humour.

The series still is far from the funniest show out there; in this season alone, I can name eight series that made me laugh harder than what Hetalia had to offer. However, in its second season it’s become much more consistent when compared to the first season: every episode was guaranteed to get a chuckle out of me, and it didn’t waste its time anymore on the pointless sketches as the garage cleaning, and the most annoying character of the first season (Liechtenstein) Only made one very small appearance. The historical and cultural references throughout the series are still spot-on, despite the at first seemingly stereotypical portrayal of all of the different countries.

The weak point of this season lies in the gay jokes. There are way too many of them, and they’re just not funny. Well, to me at least, but I found that the awkward moments in which whichever two countries made these embarrassed facial expressions whenever something even remotely ‘cute’ happened get old soon. I don’t have anything fundamentally against gay jokes, I enjoyed them for what they were in Junjo Romantica, but here they just won’t work.

Reviewing comedy series of course is something very personal, since everyone has a different kind of sense of humour, but I do want to praise Hetalia for this: its subject matter. Remember how last year, a bunch of Koreans got offended because this series parodied it? It just shows how easily ticked off some people are, by simple and innocent jokes. This series opened up a lot of discussions on that matter, and I hope that it helped along to build a bridge, so that we can in the future simply make innocent fun of other cultures without having hordes of angry people condemn you to death.