Seriously, Freedom is everything a shounen anime should be. Anime often seem to forget that every single fourteen year-old boy is an idiot, no matter what. Sure, they make their main male leads do something stupid once in a while, but that almost never goes further than an underdeveloped quirk. Freedom, however, is different, and it actually manages to portray the main characters as the idiots they are, and that’s where it starts playing with it.

In this episode, Takeru and Biz as expected get to know the people of Ao’s village and their customs. In the meantime, a typhoon passes by and Takeru confesses how he loves Ao and just travelled to earth to meet her. Biz was also really cute when he tried to impress a local radio-host.

I’m wondering how this series is planning to end. Will Takeru, Biz and Ao go back to the moon, or did the creators have something more epic in mind? And what’s this “Freedom” people keep speaking of.
F

Koharu Biyori temporarily made me lose my faith in OVAs. Thankfully, FREEDOM managed to restore it. This is everything a shounen-adventure should be: fun, creative and most importantly: innocent.

And seriously, I love the OP and ED for this series. I finally realized that the OP consists out of rendered images from previous episodes, and it really looks excellent, and this really gives this series an even more unique style. The ED also still is catchy, even after hearing it a few times.

This episode was really different from the previous ones, and it mostly consisted out of the males, having fun and making idiots out of themselves. I laughed quite a bit, though, and some of the banter between both Takeru and Biz and the truck of idiots they run into was priceless. Takeru is one of the few shounen-leads that made an impression on me. Simply because he actually has a dream, albeit a little childish one (meeting the girl he fell in love with and all) and he doesn’t stop until he reaches it.
This is so much better than your average shounen lead who doesn’t have a goal beyond “score a girl”, or “become the best X in the world”. To me, it just shows that they just go in brainless random directions without any real goal in mind, and that’s not really that exciting for me. It also helps that this show is quite well written, with perhaps a few bugs as where the characters get their water from.

I also laughed when Takeru and Biz were really planning to show themselves to Ao in gold and silver alien-suits they received from the guys who provided them a ride. You think that the encounter would be the most romantic thing ever, but no, the writers had other ideas. ^^; Perhaps it’s because of that that the climax worked again so well, despite the predictability (I mean, they had to find the girl at the end of the episode, didn’t they?). It is going to be fun to see how he’s going to talk himself out of it, the next episode should promise to be fun, and I’m interested in how the creators decide to portray Ao.

Even after its third instalment, FREEDOM still doesn’t fail to entertain, and yet again, it leaves us with another powerful climax. This probably is strengthened even more by the ED. The best OPs and EDs, in my opinion, don’t just consist of good songs, but also contribute to the anime they belong to. Mushishi, for example, just went on with its peaceful mood even when the ED set in. The OP for Wellber no Monogatari is a perfect introduction, which captures the essence of the anime quite nicely. It’s so much better than these OPs which feature flashes of each different protagonist just because they have to, or the EDs, whose only purpose is to show the credits.

The goal of this episode: send Takeru to Earth. Pretty straightforward, and it’s handled quite decently. He managed to escape from these strange robots we saw in the previous episode, barely avoiding suffocation, though. And I finally realize how important Alan is in all this. He took in the citizens who didn’t want to live in Eden. If I’m not mistaken, he called it Freedom, hence the title of this anime. Because he helped Takeru, though, he endangered it, and the citizens of Freedom are threatened to be retrained and turned into proper Eden Citizens. Still, he does manage to give Takeru instructions on how to use one of the escape rockets that were in the original version of Eden.

One thing I also like about this anime: it knows what it wants to be. It doesn’t try to introduce any needless side-quests in order to impress its viewers, it just wants to tell the story of Takeru, and how he unravels the mysteries around earth. That’s one of the advantages of being an OVA: you can’t waste time on needless fillers. So far, things have been very believable, with only a few botches, like the fact that when you slowly drive a car, it uses less fuel than when you race at full speed, and the fact that Tairo was very lucky to have run into Takeru like that. Apart from that, it avoided some major pitfalls, and it actually made the fact that Takeru got lifted off in the end plausible and believable. The solution for the food-source also was pretty nice, although I do wonder why people would leave a box full of instant-noodles in a place like that. XD

What also surprised me was how Kazuma ended up being left behind, while Bis, who was reluctant to go ended up going. Taira also was great when he tried to help Takeru get his way. Without him, Takeru probably would’ve failed, and I love how the rivalry between the two of them ended up. ^_^

Short Synopsis: Earth has become completely uninhabitable due to the fall of a huge space station down the atmosphere. At least, that’s what people want the citizens of Eden to believe.
Good: The ending of the episode.
Bad: Okay, it wasn’t too realistic, though.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10

Ah, why not. I’m going to blog this OVA. It’s only coming out once a season, and it could definitely use a bit of extra attention, as the setting is really interesting so far. I like how this anime uses the technique of cell-shading. It definitely works as an art style, though the creators still haven’t figured out how to synchronize mouth movement properly apparently.

This anime basically tells two stories: that of Takeru and his surroundings, his friends and his rivals, and his search for the mysterious girl in the picture. The first part may be nice and all, but what really caught my interest was the second part, ever since the ending of the previous episode. Me likes the mystery. This episode basically shows Takeru, trying to find the girl on the picture, and eventually discovering that she’s from earth. For some reason, however, the authorities of Eden are determined to keep this a secret from their citizens.

I loved the ending of this episode. Okay, it’s a bit overglorified, only when Takeru climbs a not-so-large mountain, he sees the earth very clearly, instead of on the horizon, and he just happens to run into the messages from earth, but I’m willing to forgive this to the creators. It seems this anime is going to focus on Takeru, as he tries to go against the government of Eden and return to earth. It’ll be interesting to see what happens in the end. So far, there are a lot of bad OVA’s around here, but FREEDOM definitely is worth watching.