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thatgamefromthatad · 4 years ago

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Seen these ads? (Obey Me! Review)

This is a visual novel/otome/gacha card RPG game with the same characters and themes as featured in the ads.

As stated in many of the ads this game centers around seven demon brother love interests (as well as some other potential love interests) although the game has a lot of plot elements other than just romance. Most of the ads that I’ve seen feature real art that appears in the game one way or another, and the ads tend to be focused more on the characters and theme in general rather than specific gameplay. Of the ads that do appear to show gameplay, most of the time it’s not really what you’ll see in the game but still follows fairly close to the actual game (for example, the “kiss, free, whip” ad on the top left doesn’t show real gameplay, but you can kiss or whip that character. But that specific art comes from a gacha card I believe and isn’t what you see when you do the kissing and whipping).

A few notes before I get into the full review:

I’m a lesbian, so I’m definitely not the target audience for this game, but I always try to be objective and open-minded when playing any game I’m not the target audience for (other examples I’ve reviewed in the past are Moments, which was also primarily targeted toward women who are attracted to men, Immortal Taoists, which involved a genre I had never heard of before and really had no interest in, Time Princess, which also wasn’t my favorite genre but was still a great game, and various Genius Inc. visual novels, which are targeted more toward high-school age boys as far as I can tell).

Speaking of lesbians, this game weirdly censors the word “lesbians” but not any other LGBTQ+ terms (that don’t include the word “sexual”) as far as I can tell; I decided it was enough of a one-off thing that it wouldn’t factor a huge amount in my overall review of the game, but I think it’s still something to take note of and not let off the hook since it definitely shows bias and can be offensive to players.

This game is rated 12+ on the Apple App Store, and I was pretty harsh on Crush Crush for being rated that way because I thought it crossed the line with some of its sexually suggestive content. I kept that in mind while playing this one, and personally I don’t think it crossed the line in the same way, at least not from what I’ve played so far; although it does have sexually suggestive content (most often when interacting with the character Asmodeus, who is literally known in the game as the “Avatar of Lust”), it’s much more occasional through tidbits of dialog as opposed to in Crush Crush where it involved a whole section of the game and was more interactive in nature. I would definitely still cringe at the thought of a 12-year-old reading some of this dialog, but I think it fits fairly within the App Store descriptors of “Infrequent/Mild Sexual Content and Nudity” and “Infrequent/Mild Mature/Suggestive Themes.”

Last note - there is a character in this game (Luke) who has the appearance and demeanor of a small child who you can interact with in a similar way to the other love interest characters, which concerned me for obvious reasons. I looked more into this, specifically reading into all of the different dialog options involving this character, and his responses never seem to be more than platonic, which is good. He still blushes when you give him gifts and stuff, which is kind of awkward, and it seems weird to throw a kid character into an otome game, but all considered I wouldn’t say the game is promoting anything inappropriate (unlike one of the Genius VNs that clearly involved relationships between an adult and minors).

Sorry I know that’s a lot of notes and disclaimers but I just wanted to that all out of the way as general concerns anyone might have trying this game or reading this review!

Without further ado, read my full review below:

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(I’m trying a new color-coding system to help highlight some of the main points of my review if you don’t want to read my entire essay word-for-word lol. Pink is a positive aspect of the game, red is a negative aspect/criticism and purple is not necessarily positive or negative but just something I wanted to highlight.)

😈 Is the game actually fun? Yes! Just in terms of production value, this game is top notch: the art and character designs are very appealing, the transitions between characters’ poses and facial expressions during VN scenes are actually animated (which looks much smoother and more natural than switching between still images), the voice acting is great (although the VN scenes aren’t fully voice acted, some parts like phone calls are and the characters say different phrases during scenes and battles as well)(Note: all the voice acting is Japanese), and the music is FANTASTIC and perfectly sets the vibe throughout the game.

The best parts of this game in my opinion are the different personalities of the characters and the overall plot; although some of the characters’ personalities can be a bit one-note at times (for example, one character’s entire personality that I’ve seen so far is that he likes to eat and is always hungry), the characters each have their own charm and play off each other well. I found myself getting invested in each of the characters’ desires and goals throughout the story, even the characters I didn’t particularly like. The story is also chock full of humor which is always fun, and the whole world and backstory built around this game (the “Devildom” setting and the idea of an exchange student program with angels, humans and demons) are also unique and impressive.

I really enjoyed the multiple modes of storytelling i.e. how the VN chapters are supplemented with text messages and phone calls from characters and an Instagram spoof with additional side stories to unlock. I know this isn’t a new thing in mobile games (even Gardenscapes and Homescapes do it to an extent lol) but add the compelling characters and overall production value on top and it’s a really enjoyable experience. Since the home screen of the game is set up like it’s your phone, with the different parts of the game represented as “apps,” the game kind of creates a feeling like you’re really living in this world with these characters where you can freely scroll through their Instagram feeds and check the messages you get from them on your own time. The shop where you can buy items and premium currency is called Akuzon (an Amazon spoof) and the place where all your gacha cards are is called “contacts,” which further adds to the immersive effect.

The “dating” part of the game is pretty cute although I haven’t gotten super far so I’m not sure of the full scope of the romantic interactions. From what I can tell, in addition to the dialog, blushy faces and bedroom eyes you get from characters when you give them gifts and touch different parts of their body (above the belt lol), when you raise your intimacy level with them you get additional phone calls and messages from them (I haven’t played a lot of otome games but I think that’s how a lot of them go). I wasn’t that invested in this part of the game but I think there’s some strategy that goes with using the right combination of gifts and touches to maximize intimacy boosts and get certain dialog, which adds a whole other aspect of gameplay in addition to the main game. I also noticed that occasionally your choices throughout the VN chapters will give you a small intimacy boost with a certain character; I kind of wish this was even more integrated since most of the time I felt like no matter what I chose it didn’t make any difference in my relationship with characters. Also, I don’t think there’s a way to “officially” date a specific character, it’s more about raising the intimacy level to earn more interactions but it doesn’t actually affect the main plot.

As far as the main mode of progressing through the game, which is winning “dance battles” with teams from your gacha collection, this part of the game has its own positive qualities such as the cute chibi forms of the characters that appear on screen and the fact that some of the special attacks show a little anime clip of the character (of course it’s less exciting when you see the same clip every battle but I still thought it was a nice touch). I was a little disappointed that there wasn’t a rhythm aspect as the “dance battle” name would imply, and your main interaction during the battle itself is basically just tapping hearts that pop up and tapping the characters when their attacks are ready, but you also have the option to skip that whole interactive sequence and just get a result based on your team’s stats, so there’s not much to complain about there (especially since the battles are sort of a side note compared to the storytelling aspect of the game despite being the main element of RPG-based gameplay that allows you to progress). If you are interested in the RPG aspects, there’s plenty of that to work with (building teams, balancing attributes, managing resources/rewards to level up cards and progress through skill trees of sorts, all that good stuff) although you’re limited to an extent by how difficult it is to get a lot of gacha draws without paying real money. It’s even harder to be able to focus on both strategy and character relationships while playing for free when the same scarce currency is used for both gacha draws and gifts.

👿 Is this a free game or a “free game”? Despite what I just said, I would still consider it a free game - you can gradually save up some of premium currency the game gives out through tasks in order to pay for more gacha draws and other items, and as far as I can tell you can access the main story and the other parts of the game without hitting a paywall. I only got to the fourth chapter so far though so don’t take this assessment as gospel. Like with a lot of other freemium games you might feel pressured to pay (especially when you run out of gifts to give your lover boys, which was the biggest downer for me, or if you’re obsessed with wanting to collect a lot of cards or get a specific card) but since you don’t actually need to pay to progress I still consider it free.

There’s also an energy system where you hit a wall and have to wait if you run out, but I never ran out because of the huge amount of energy the game dumps on you when you first start, and it seems like there are a bunch of other ways to get extra energy as well. There also aren’t pop-up or watch-to-earn ads in this game that I saw.

💀 Features

Main visual novel scenes and storyline (the visual novel scenes come between dance battle stages and there are a few short side routes that branch off but still one main route as far as I can tell, I don’t think your dialog choices really make a different except for in how the characters react to you immediately afterward. Still the main storyline in itself is fun to follow and it’s fun to get different reactions out of the characters based on what you say)

Dance battles (I’m not fully knowledgeable about the minutia of the RPG system at play here but in general the outcome of the battle will depend on the level, rank and attributes of your cards compared against the difficulty and attributes of the stage you’re playing. There also “memory cards” that can be assigned to support your team and expendable temporary boosters called “glow sticks” that boost your stats for one battle. During the battle itself you tap hearts that appear to earn extra points and you can tap your characters when their power is charged up to “attack” your opponent and use special skills. There are guides online that go deeper into stats and strategies and such if you’re interested. Different stages have different rewards for completion and you can quick complete levels you’ve already beaten to mine resources you need)

Gacha mechanic and cards (the gacha area of this game is called “Nightmare” and there are a few different pools along with event pools each with their own odds and sets of cards you can get. For the default pools you get free draws periodically and I believe you get one free draw for each event pool IIRC. You also get a bunch of vouchers for draws when you first start the game which got me handful of SSRs and a couple URs to build a couple of solid teams right off the bat. In addition to drawing directly from gacha pools you can get some cards by collecting card pieces as rewards from stages and events until you have enough to get the actual card. Each card has its own set of stats/attributes, can be leveled up and has a skill tree of sorts that can be progressed through with resources mined through beating stages, although it’s more of an attribute tree than a skill tree since most of the branches just add points onto one of your card’s attributes. Some cards, the rarer ones, have special skills that can be used in battle)

One-on-one characters interactions and intimacy i.e. the “dating” part (there are two ways this occurs: 1) you can set a specific character to your home screen that allows you to enter into an interaction with them, with a refresh period in between interactions 2) the main way, which is through “surprise guests” after dance battles. These surprise guests show up frequently but not always, and they’re always one of the three team members you used in battle, selected randomly. For each one-on-one interaction you can do three actions - either give a gift, touch the character or ignore the character. Sometimes the character will also offer you a high five which counts as an action if you oblige. Different characters have different favorite gifts and touching different parts of the body can get a different reaction depending on the character and your level of intimacy I believe. Your intimacy level with a character increases depending on the combination of actions you perform, and sometimes the character also gives you gifts back like more energy or resources. There are guides for this online as well)

Text messages and phone calls (text messages are the main mode of storytelling outside of the main VN scenes - you get messages from characters or multiple characters in group chats that you respond to with preset messages or stickers similar to how you make choices during the VN parts. Some of the text messages correspond with the main plot as you progress, ex. A character texts you to be in a certain place at a certain time and next VN scene is of you two meeting at that place. I think other text messages also come up when you reach certain intimacy levels with characters. There are certain group messages that you don’t respond to where you’re basically spying on a group chat among characters and just get to see what everyone’s saying. In addition to written messages and emoji stickers characters will also sometimes send pictures. Phone calls are fully voice-acted dialog you have with another character and they seem to pop up when you reach certain intimacy levels - I’ve only gotten ones so far with the two characters I have the highest intimacy with)

Instagram spoof/“Devilgram” (Devilgram is an in-game photo sharing social media app similar to Instagram and the photos on there correspond to gacha cards. When you acquire the gacha card that corresponds to a Devilgram post you unlock a side story, but you also need keys to unlock further scenes from that story, which can be gradually earned through completing tasks and such)

To Do tasks (completing tasks on your To Do is the main way to earn premium currency in the game along with other rewards and resources. There are daily tasks, overall tasks and tasks specific to each character. Examples of tasks are completing a certain stage or number of stages, beating a stage using a team that includes a certain character or reaching a certain intimacy level with a character. There are also beginner missions when you start the game that I think stay available until you complete all of them)

Events (there are sometimes side story events called “pop quizzes” and gacha events that are available for a limited time, or sometimes an event has both a corresponding pop quiz and gacha pool. The pop quizzes are separate chapters with their own dance battles and VN scenes, and the battles will come with reward points that you can spend on different prizes. Sometimes there are unique cards you can only get from an event. Other minor types of events include log-in bonus events and events where you can get special types of gifts for your love interests. There’s also a feature where you can “time-travel” back to old events at some cost but I haven’t explored this much)

Jobs (you can assign characters to passively complete jobs that earn you a small amount of non-premium currency over time and also increases your intimacy with the assigned characters by a small amount)

Customization (you can unlock avatars of different characters to use for your profile and set the name you want characters to refer to you by throughout the game. You can also change the outfit of your homescreen character, change the homescreen wallpaper and change the homescreen background music by making purchases in the Akuzon shop or acquiring certain gacha cards)

⚖️ Ad Honesty Rating: 4/5 (just from the ads I’ve seen, especially the ones that appear to be running currently, there don’t seem to be blatantly fake ads and the ads show real art and do well conveying the theme and characters in the game. However some of the ads are misleading about the actual mechanics of gameplay and may also lead you to believe there are actual romance routes with the characters which is not really the case)

⭐️ Overall Rating: 5/5 (I definitely didn’t want to give this game a great rating just because it’s super popular on Tumblr but I can definitely see why it’s so popular. There are lots of things to do, the characters are very lovable, it’s funny, the art is great, the music is great and the lore and overall vibe are compelling and unique. It’s a high-quality game with a good story and I’ll probably keep playing it)

▶️ Ad Example:

▶️ Gameplay Examples:

Dance Battles

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Surprise Guest

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If you got through this review bless your heart ❤️ Special thanks to @human-watching-ads-from-devildom which is where I was able to view some of the ads since I was having trouble finding them elsewhere online and viewing some of them on the Facebook ad library.

Follow me for more reviews of those free mobile games you’re always getting ads for! Thanks for reading! 🥳

#obey me #obey me shall we date #otome games #gacha games #visual novels #full review #anime games #rpg #dating simulation games #romance games #war and peace but it’s just a review of a mobile game #sorry if there are typos or mistakes

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meimae · 4 years ago

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Look at me, not being on time for my April Immersion Overview as is the usual. (・w・;

First, little blog updates to get out of the way:

I reached 100 followers! Got an influx of people checking out my 1 year update post, and got plenty of nice compliments on my data collection.

For those of you wondering just why I keep up with so much data, it's mostly because it can get really hard to notice how much you're improving in a language especially with something like immersion learning that for people who don't get it feels like a waste of time or a time sink.

Graphs showing consistency, improvement in reading speed, increasing vocabulary counts, and generally just seeing numbers grow turns language learning more fun and motivating for me, and if as a bonus, it encourages someone to try immersion learning then that would be cool!

With that said, whether you're here as a fellow language learner, graphs enthusiast (笑), or just want some Japanese media recommendations, ようこそ!

Also, made a tiny DP change - it’s チト from 少女週末旅行. Pretty sure it’s the first manga series I ever finished in Japanese (not the first one I started since ちはやふる is still ongoing), and I always felt a bit of a ☆connection☆ with her - between her book-loving personality and being a no-nonsense kind of person, there was no way for me not to enjoy her character. Great beginner anime/manga if you’re not into most beginner recommendations.

-☆-

April has been a pretty good immersion month, as I was able to dip my toes in a variety of media. A bit competitive, too! The club I joined has been pulling all the stops to get to the Top 20 Immersion Leaderboard in it’s first month. I was able to snag the 9th spot among a bunch of people of different comprehension levels (the majority being N1+ since they’re able to comprehend much more and in turn stand longer immersion hours). Lots of tiny complaints though of potential “whitenoising” content (”listening” and “reading” but not comprehending very well just to get a large number to post), but really what can you do? People lie all the time on the internet. Besides, it’s internet points that doesn’t do anything beyond being a little shiny I guess.

Enough about that, let’s get into the nitty-gritty details you came here for!

ANIME

フルーツバスケット

Might need to rewatch this one. Felt like I didn’t connect with the characters the way the rest of its fandom has. I’m kinda sad about it, since I normally love Slice of Life and Fantasy, and I know this is one of my friend’s diehard shows.

ラブライブ! School Idol Project S2

A filler anime to watch tbh. Nice and easy enough to follow for beginners. Pretty good songs. With regards to it being a show about music and moe, I still 100% prefer K-On! if I’m going to be honest, but for a show about non-toxic idols, it’s good!

魔法少女まどか☆マギカ

First read this as English translated manga when I was 13 or something. Mistakes were made. Let’s all just agree to throw キュウベえ into a pit of fire and never talk about it again. Great ending and a show that really reworked the magical girl genre. But seriously, I was traumatized by マミ’s death then and now, help.

四月は君の嘘

Already knew what was going to happen even before watching this so I didn’t ugly cry like I was expecting. Still got that awful sinking feeling though. 10/10 would recommend for a good cry. Also, I’m planning to read the manga, might enjoy that more, because I’ve always liked it more than anime actually. *shocked pikachu face*

ホリミヤ

Watched before I even finished the manga which felt like a mistake at first until I realized that it perfectly stops where I stopped reading. Nice and comfy anime, the kind I would have loved as a teen. Fun animation too, making parts very dramatic even though it wasn’t really that deep of an issue even in the manga. Just teens feeling feelings. Still salty that we lose bad boy styled 宮村, but I get why it had to happen.

AUDIOBOOKS

氷菓

Second re-listen. I understand it fine, but it’s very easy to drift off when you can’t catch all the words so I had to replay often. Will have to mine more from the anime/book.

君の名は

I mined from the anime, and was really pleased to be able to follow all 6 hours of this audiobook perfectly fine. Will need to read the book, because I realized just how seamless reading it would be after listening to it with hardly any issue.

BOOKS

キッチェン

Completed! Read my thoughts about it and see my stats on this post.

君の膵臓を食べたい

Still trudging on with this one. It’s not a bad story, it’s pretty well written actually, I just made the mistake of watching both the anime and live adaptation first, so I know exactly what’s going to happen and it’s killing my motivation to keep reading. I guess reading the book first before watching the movie still applies in any language with me. Really need to 頑張れ and finish so I can move on.

三日間の幸福

Started reading towards the end of the month, mostly because I realized that every chapter is only 5000-15000 characters long, and I was able to read up to 40k in a day with Island most days. Only two chapters read so far though because I got distracted by manga, but it’s shaping up to be a really good plot and potentially a really sad one, too, so I’m interested.

DRAMA

花ざかりの君たちへイケメンパラダイス

Heard this was a classic so I gave it a try. Loved 生田斗真’s character in this one the most especially all his internal dialogue acted out. Also, 小栗旬 in anything is bound to be a good watch. Simple and fun watch. They dragged the ending so much though lmao

ごくせん

Look, I see 松本潤, I click. Definitely the kind of show you should watch for some great life advice. Planning to watch the 2nd and 3rd seasons even if there is a terrible lack of 松本潤, because I love my strong female protagonists, and man, ヤンクミ is such a great character. Need to read the manga, too, if I can find it.

極主夫道

Oof, this was kind of hard. The yakuza talk was throwing me off, but the rest of it was enjoyable. Not really plot heavy as I thought it was going to be. The comedy side of it was fun and predictable after the first few episodes. Overall, pretty good slice of life, family story with a twist.

MANGA

Read a bunch of manga this month, mostly because I am struggling to find the next vn to read.

おやすみプンプン

Read a couple of volumes (6-7). This manga is so good, but it’s so depressing I need to stop to take a breather every once in a while. Please don’t leave any spoilers. The club has been reacting to me reading this, and it has mostly been a lot of crying emotes. It’s both been enjoyable to see and really worrying. 笑

チェンソーマン

Club recommendation. Only read the 1st volume so far. I really need to get into more 少年 anime/manga. That’s currently my 苦手 genre which is awful because literally all the top anime/manga is 少年 help. I just can’t enjoy it much still even though it’s comprehensible to me.

ちはやふる中学生編

Read Vol. 1, chill read to me at this point after reading 45 volumes of the regular manga. Look, it’s my favorite 幼馴染 manga in baby format, of course I’m going to read this! 太一 has been a flake way before season 3 confirmed. Don’t come at me たいちはや stans bc I also like his character.

約束のネバーランド

Volume 7. I’m taking my sweet time with this one, because I heard the anime for season 2 sucked, so I’m avoiding it like the plague. This is 少年 how am I enjoying this and not everything else what.

ヲタクに恋は難しい

Enjoyed the anime hated the movie why did they make it a musical that sucked (ps i normally love musicals hated this one)

The オタク jargon is kinda hard to read suprisingly but I do enjoy this ship very much. It’s a lighthearted take to otaku culture which is great because seriously it’s scary out there.

ツバサ -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE-

It’s my childhood ship, obviously I will read this again (read in English several years ago). Still as plot twisty as I remember it being (now at a bonus hard level reading it in Japanese 笑). Really enjoyed reading this one (I finished it this May).

-☆-

I’m starting to really dislike furigana in manga. It was a great help as a beginner, but now it’s like training wheels that you can’t take off. I feel like the gains I’m getting from manga is much lower than it was when I first started which makes me both proud of how far I’ve come, but also sad because I love manga. Sad that I might have to start choose VNs over it, because it’s not going to challenge me as much going forward. I mean it didn’t stop me from reading a lot of it this month, but you get the picture.

VISUAL NOVELS

ISLAND

Completed! See my stats and read my long spoiler filled post here.

ファタモルガーナの館

Picked up this VN and finished two doors (15 hours) before stopping. On the fence about it, because it has been kind of predictable so far, and I don’t particularly enjoy the horror genre. That said, this is more psychological than anything, so it’s probably not that that’s putting me off. The language is not exactly difficult, too - maybe some oddly specific words because it is after all historical fiction (which is one of my favorite genres, btw), and 敬語 is definitely interesting to read for once after encountering so many お嬢様 characters in anime/drama so far.

I think maybe it’s the conversations that are kind of dull - dots (silence) every few clicks that keeps breaking the flow of reading. Probably judging it really harshly too early, because it’s rated so high everywhere, and I just have high expectations. Definitely not dropping it yet though, just taking a break and testing a couple of other VNs before I settle with whatever I end up choosing. It is, after all, going to be another 50+ hour read, and I just don’t want to not enjoy the process, because having fun with the process is a huge part of immersion learning.

Let me know if you’ve read Fata and if I should continue!

-☆-

That’s it for this month!

If you have any suggestions on what to watch and read next, please send me a reply, especially for VNs because I’m struggling over here.

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scoutception · 4 years ago

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Yet again ranking the 5 animes I’ve watched most recently

After losing the will to just sit down and watch it for quite a while, I’ve finally gotten through 5 anime series yet again, and, as is tradition for me by now, I’ve decided to just type out my thoughts and rankings of them, with my first two posts of this nature being here and here. As usual, this is just my personal thoughts, and the only other thing worth noting before I start is that, unlike last time, I do think everything listed here is at least decent on its own. With that, I’ll just get to it. 5. Robotics;Notes

Number of episodes: 22. Language options: dub and subs available. Streaming availability: Funimation. Robotics;Notes is an adaptation of a visual novel, which I actually just wrote a review on, which can be found here. Long story short, it’s the third entry in the Science Adventure series, the same series Steins;Gate is part of, unknown to most people, with Robotics;Notes technically being the sequel to it. Originally aired in 2012, the same year as the visual novel was released, and made by Production I.G, Robotics;Notes is in an interesting middle ground between the acclaimed and popular Steins;Gate animes and the downright awful and obscure Chaos;Head and Chaos;Child animes, and until 2020 was the only option those who didn’t speak Japanese had to experience it at all. Since I went into so much detail in said visual novel review, I’m mostly going to focus on how the anime holds up both by itself and as an adaptation. Ever since its creation nearly ten years ago, the dream of the Chuo Tanegashima High Robotics Research Club has been to finish Gunbuild-1, a lifesize recreation of Gunvarrel, the titular mecha of an insanely popular anime that’s credited with starting a “robot boom” within Japan, and the club’s current president, Akiho Senomiya, the little sister of the club’s founder, Misaki Senomiya, is extremely determined to see this dream achieved. Unfortunately for her, the club has fallen on hard times, with its funding being cut, its advisor being completely unreliable, and the few other members it has, namely Kaito Yashio, Subaru Hidaka, Junna Daitoku, and Kona Furugoori, aka Frau Koujiro, being quite difficult in their own ways, and often more than Akiho can handle. While Akiho puts her all into finally bringing the club to greatness, the otherwise apathetic Kaito finds himself involved with a mysterious AI called Airi, who exists within the augmented reality app IRUO. Airi’s creator, the deceased Kou Kimijima, turns out to have also created several AR annotations scattered throughout Tanegashima, titled the Kimijima Reports, which warn of a grand conspiracy that will utterly devastate humanity if unopposed. I’m not the most unbiased viewer, since I had played, and enjoyed, the visual novel months before watching this anime, but generally, it’s actually an enjoyable time. Some of Robotics;Notes’ biggest strengths were always its cast of characters and lighter tone, and for the most part, the anime preserves both well, keeping it mostly silly, but endearing early on. The artstyle actually matches up fairly well with the VN’s CGs, and the dub, which I watched just to spice things up, since I already knew the Japanese voice cast was quite good, is overall solid, with Clifford Chapin as Kaito, Lindsay Seidel as Akiho, and Monica Rial as Junna especially sticking out to me. As an adaptation, on the other hand, it falls short in quite a few places, namely when it comes to characterization. While obviously, no adaptation could feasibly fit in every detail from its source material, the Steins;Gate anime managed to preserve almost all of its cast’s characterization, whereas in Robotics;Notes, several characters lose prominent details to their backstories or personal conflicts, or act differently in scenes unrelated to that, making quite a few of them come off different. While instances of the latter case, such as Junna coming off as less shy and hesitant, don’t necessarily worsen anything for the most part, the former definitely does, as it makes the affected characters much less developed and interesting. Nobody suffers from this worse than Kaito himself, who loses most of his backstory, motivations, and arc, to the point of one of his best moments being changed from something intentional to completely accidental, with the end result making him come off as a completely different character, and an inferior one, at that. Additionally, around episode 16, the anime starts diverging pretty significantly from the VN, and not in ways that are improvements, to the point it even leaves a few otherwise preserved scenes in earlier episodes without context. Overall, I can imagine the Robotics;Notes anime still being a decent, if unremarkable watch on its own, and was certainly an interesting and fun way to reexperience the story, and definitely fares better than many visual novel adaptations, but I can’t quite say I’d recommend it. If Robotics;Notes interests you, the visual novel is very much preferred. 4. Nichijou

Number of episodes: 26. Language options: dub and subs available. Streaming options: Funimation. Here we have one of the most acclaimed anime comedies out there, an adaptation of Keiichi Arawi’s surreal sketch comedy manga series, produced by Kyoto Animation, a name that’ll be showing up here again later. Nichijou mainly focuses on two different trios of characters. There’s the ordinary high school girls Yuuko Aioi, a rather dim and reckless girl with terrible luck, Mio Naganohara, the most relatively normal one of the cast, whenever she’s not having explosive freak outs that involve beating people up, and Mai Minakami, a stoic girl who enjoys messing with people just for their reactions. On the other hand, there’s the far less ordinary Shinonome Laboratories trio of Professor Shinonome, an 8 year old girl who happens to be capable of building incredibly advanced machines, Nano Shinonome, a robot built by the Professor who desperately desires a normal girl more than anything, and Sakamoto, their pet cat who, thanks to a special scarf also made by the Professor, is capable of talking. The series focuses on their would-be ordinary lives, were it not for the seemingly daily chaos they get involved in, from witnessing the school principal wrestle a wild deer, to being trapped in an elevator for hours, to the school science teacher attempting to capture Nano for study. It also follows the antics of several other side characters, such Koujiro Sasahara, the seemingly upper class student who is actually just the son of a family of farmers, to Misato Tachibana, a very typical tsundere towards Sasahara, whose tsun side manifests as assaulting him with military-grade weapons, to little effect, to the equally quirky teachers of their school. Needless to say, it’s a very silly and chaotic series, and that’s exactly what makes it so memorable. The humor is pretty hit and miss in the first half of the series, but from episode 14 onwards, they thoroughly master it, with every episode having at least a few scenes that got me laughing. Beyond the silliness, though, the series actually has a lot of heart to it. There’s a few moments that change up the status quo, or even develop the characters just a bit, and some scenes are surprisingly sweet, if still played for laughs more often than not. There’s also a lot of continuity, which in later episodes often provide the punchlines to some of the best gags, which definitely encourages watching the whole series. The Japanese voice acting is fittingly crazy for each character, and the animation fits perfectly, as while the character designs are quite simple, there’s many would be mundane moments that have contrasting overly impressive and exaggerated animation that makes them very memorable. All in all, Nichijou is a very enjoyable series once it finds its groove, and about the only reason its not higher on my rankings is just because pure comedies aren’t really one of my favorite genres. Still, if you ever want a good laugh, you can’t go wrong with this. 3. Soul Eater

Number of episodes: 51. Language options: dub and subs available. Streaming availability: Netflix, Funimation. Soul Eater is yet another adaptation, this time of a manga by Atsushi Ōkubo, produced by Studio Bones, who also did the Fullmetal Alchemist animes, and is quite similar to the original FMA series in that it outpaced the manga and, rather than simply overloading itself with filler, decided to go in an entirely different direction by the end. The Death Weapon Meister Academy is a school founded by Death himself, dedicated to the training of Meisters, who wield Weapons, humans with the ability to shapeshift into weapons, for the purpose of destroying Kishin Eggs, evil beings who have consumed the souls of others, and pose the risk of transforming into extremely dangerous demons. Any Meister who can collect the souls of these corrupted beings, as well as the soul of a Witch, can transform their Weapon into a Death Scythe, the personal arms of Death. Among the students of the DWMA are seven Meisters and Weapons who stand out in particular: the teams of Maka Albarn, a kind hearted and responsible, though temperamental, girl, her Weapon, Soul “Eater” Evans, a laidback and snarky wannabe “cool” guy, Black Star, a prideful and loudmouthed ninja who’s seemingly always out to make a spectacle of himself, regardless of how it hampers him, his Weapon, Tsubaki, a humble and levelheaded woman, Death the Kid, the son of Death and one of the top students in the cool, held back only by a crippling obsession with symmetry, and his Weapons, Liz and Patty Thompson. While these seven gradually come together as a team, a Witch named Medusa begins to put an ambitious and destructive plan into motion, one involving her “child”, Crona, and the strange, insanity inducing black blood that courses through their veins. Soul Eater has a lot going for it. A likeable and crazy cast of characters, even the side ones, like the maniacal Doctor Stein, or the surprisingly goofy and casual Death, or the tragic Crona, or the hilariously egotistical Excalibur, to a lot of fun action scenes, to its great animation and overall unique visual design, including the sun and moon having giant, creepy laughing faces. It has a lighthearted, comedic tone that doesn’t detract from the serious moments, and the main characters get some pretty good development as the series goes on. The dub is also great, with Laura Bailey as Maka, Micah Solusod as Soul, Brittney Karbowski as Black Star, and Todd Haberkorn as Death the Kid especially sticking out to me. In general, I don’t have a lot of significant criticisms, besides how the story is handled once the villainous organization Arachnophobia is introduced, which is also about where it begins to deviate from the manga. Most of the villains part of it never really feel like a threat, and the story becomes much more simple and typical compared to how the manga went, and when the ending arrives, it just kinda, happens, with several notable subplots just kinda left unfinished. It definitely feels like an underwhelming ending, and is a big reason why I place this lower on the list, but Soul Eater is still a pretty entertaining watch that’s worth a try if you want a decently lengthy, but not horribly long shonen. 2. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

Number of episodes: 28. Language options: dub and subs available. Streaming availability: Funimation. Here we have the big one, an extremely memetic and famous series by Kyoto Animation, based on a series of light novels by Nagaru Tanigawa, a series that was finally completed back in November 2020 after its start in 2003. Kyon is a lazy and down to earth high school student who wishes for little more for himself than an uneventful, normal high school life- a hope that’s abruptly shattered when, on a whim, he becomes involved with Haruhi Suzumiya, an eccentric, hyperactive, and thoroughly self centered girl, who claims to have no interest in ordinary humans, and instead wishes to discover things thoroughly unusual, such as aliens, time travelers, or espers, and forces Kyon to form a club, the SOS Brigade, with her to achieve this. Haruhi quickly pulls three other students into the brigade, those being Yuki Nagato, a stoic and quiet bookworm, Mikuru Asahina, a shy and passive girl often subjected to humiliation and abuse by Haruhi, and Itsuki Koizumi, a calm transfer student who acts extremely subservient to Haruhi. While Kyon initially writes off the club as an unreasonable use of his time, his fellow members reveal an unexpected truth to him: the subjects of Haruhi’s fascinations actually do exist. Yuki is an alien, of a sort, created and controlled by an entity known as the Data Overmind, Mikuru is a time traveler from some point in the future, and Itsuki is an esper, and member of an organization of similar people. All three of them have been sent to observe the oblivious Haruhi, who appears to have the unconscious ability to change reality itself according to her desires, and is at threat of remaking the entire world if not placated. With Haruhi apparently having taken a unique interest in Kyon, he finds himself taken along for all sorts of supernatural adventures spawned from Haruhi’s whims. There’s a lot I could go on about regarding Haruhi, but in the interest of not turning this into a full on rant, I’ll keep shortish. It’s more or less an insane mishmash of several different genres, from slice of life, to science fiction, to fantasy, just depending on what each individual story feels like being. The episodes are mostly adapted from the early light novels, mostly the multiple stories from the third and fifth novels, The Boredom and The Rampage of Haruhi Suzumiya, respectively. It’s not often you’ll have any idea just what to expect from each individual episode, which makes the series very chaotic, but interesting. The characters are likeable and memorable, including the side characters, and the sheer ridiculousness of what goes on makes for many amusing moments. At the same time, the series is surprisingly complex, with many possible interpretations of its characters and the events they go through, furthered by the antics Kyoto Animation pulled when it was originally airing, such as airing the episodes out of chronological order, meaning the plot would often jump from the middle of an arc to something else. The end result is a very unique and enjoyable product, helped by the fantastic dub, with the actors capturing each character perfectly, from Crispin Freeman as the grounded and snarky Kyon, to Wendee Lee as the aggressively energetic Haruhi, to Stephanie Sheh as the gentle, yet secretive Mikuru. That said, there is one pretty disappointing part of it all, and that’s the second season, mostly thanks to the infamous Endless Eight arc, an eight part arc that’s more or less the same things happening over and over, with only the first and last episodes having anything noticeably different. Regardless of its own uniqueness, more than half the season is taken over by this, and something that may have worked if cut down to three or four episodes instead singlehandedly killed off the series’ goodwill. About the only redeeming factor of the second season is the five part adaptation of The Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya, which has some of the funniest moments in the whole series. Overall, Haruhi is still a very fun series, and I’m really gonna have to watch its movie, The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, one of these days. 1. Trigun

Number of episodes: 26. Language options: dub and subs available. Streaming availability: Funimation, Hulu. Finishing off this list is an adaptation of a manga series by Yasuhiro Nightow, produced by Madhouse and another adaptation that overtook its source material. Compared to how Soul Eater handled it, however, Trigun went down much, much better, to the point Nightow himself had nothing but praise for how the anime turned out, and the series is generally considered one of the best animes of the late 90′s. On the harsh desert planet of Gunsmoke lives a wandering gunslinger known as Vash the Stampede, the “Humanoid Typhoon” with a large handgun known to leave tremendous destruction in his wake, who amassed a bounty of $$60,000,000,000 after destroying the city of July, leading to an endless trail of bounty hunters out to collect the price on his head. In the middle of all this, Meryl Stryfe and Milly Thompson, two representatives of an insurance society which is often forced to pay for damages caused by Vash, track him down for the purposes of minimizing the chaos he causes. Upon catching up with him, however, the duo discovers that, contrary to his reputation, Vash is a kindhearted goof, and self proclaimed hunter of love and peace, who absolutely refuses to ever take another person’s life, even at great personal risk to himself. Vash continues his travels carefree, helping out whoever he can, with the occasional assistance of Meryl and Milly, as well as a traveling priest known as Nicholas D. Wolfwood, only to one day have an encounter with a mysterious and cruel man known as Legato Bluesummers. Vash soon learns that Legato has hired a group of assassins known as the Gung-Ho Guns to kill Vash, and leave a trail of bodies wherever they go, seemingly for the sole purpose of tormenting Vash. As Vash hunts down Legato, he is gradually forced to face his past, and consider whether he can truly stay committed to his pacifist ideals. In general, Trigun is just a very, very well made series. It has a likeable and developed cast of characters, with special mention going to Vash, who is a very compelling and sympathetic character, and Wolfwood, who makes a great foil to Vash with very interesting development of his own, with characters outside of the main cast being memorable as well, from Legato himself, to even some of the more minor villains, such as the varied members of the Gung-Ho Guns, or Brilliant Dynamites Neon, who makes an inexplicably strong impression for a one off villain not even important to the overall plot. The space western setting is quite good, and the designs are great, with many villains having distinctive looks that further help them make an impression. The action is great, and the animation is also quite good, and has that 90′s anime charm. The dub, while a bit rough around the edges, is generally solid too. From Lia Sargent as the ditzy but kind Milly, to Dorothy Elias Fahn as the hotheaded Meryl, to Jeff Nimoy as the weary Wolfwood, to Richard Cansino as the calculating and disturbing Legato, with special mention needing to go to Johnny Yong Bosch as Vash. Despite it actually being his first voice acting role ever, he does a great job in portraying the many sides to Vash, and absolutely sells many of the biggest moments in the story. Speaking of which, the series started quite lighthearted and wacky, with the first four episodes actually being filler, but gets gradually darker as it goes on. The earlier episodes are still quite enjoyable on their own, though, and manage to slowly reveal new aspects to Vash in each one, before finally setting his nature in stone in episode 5. What really sells the series and makes it so memorable, however, are the themes it explores, of the practicality of unwavering pacifism, and whether taking a life, whether for heinous crimes committed without remorse, or with the purpose of protecting others, is ever justifiable. While quite a few series have touched dilemmas like this before, what makes Trigun stand out with it is the emphasis placed upon it throughout the whole series, with many episodes touching upon it in some regard. It genuinely fairly looks at the different sides of it all, and the consequences of each, with many emotional moments coming from it as a result. While the manga did ultimately take a very different turn from the anime, the anime actually preserves several of the most important plot moments, and manages to come to a satisfactory conclusion of its own regarding the themes. Ultimately, Trigun makes for a very fun and interesting watch that I highly recommend. And with that, my ranking is complete. With the exception of Robotics;Notes, I can pretty confidently recommend every show on this list. Got some more shows I plan to get through soon, so another ranking like this may be soon in the making. Either way, till next time. -Scout

#anime #trigun #nichijou #haruhi suzumiya #the melancholy of haruhi suzumiya #soul eater #robotics;notes #long post

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fukurodaze · 4 years ago

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haikyuu!! third gym squad taking the ib diploma programme

ok... my friend and i got rlly stressed the other day and made headcanons for these guys if they were to take classes in the ib... it’s like a levels but like... a bit more death!

for my ib diploma folks you can just hop on over and read what i’ve hc’d but for my non-ib folks, lemme give you a bit of an introduction to the ib diploma programme.

characters included: bokuto koutarou, kuroo tetsurou, akaashi keiji, tsukishima kei, haiba lev, hinata shouyou

THE IB DIPLOMA PROGRAMME is a rigorous two-year pre-college program in your last two years of high school. a full programme consists of one class from each of the six required groups (totalling to 6 classes), which are G1 - first language; G2 - second language; G3 - social sciences; G4 - natural sciences; G5 - mathematics; and G6 - arts (though, arts is optional, and can be switched out with another subject from G3 or G4).

within these six courses, students are required to take at least three high-level (HL) courses and three standard level courses (SL), but some students may take four HL courses and have two SL courses (kind of a rough one tho).

just to note: there’s two types of math courses - applications and interpretations (Math AI) and analysis and approaches (Math AA). MAA courses are known to be harder than MAI courses because students do more theory work and have non-calculator sections in exams, unlike MAI courses where calculators are required for every exam. also, it is possible for a person to take IB courses instead of the full diploma programme, but i’m not very well acquainted with that variation of the IB programme so we’re just going to assume all the boys got 6 courses.

okay. i am so sorry i just lectured you on a whole school curriculum. anyways. back to haikyuu!!

BOKUTO KOUTAROU : Japanese Language and Literature HL, Mandarin Ab Initio SL, Geography HL, SEHS (Sports, Exercise, and Health Science) HL, Math AI SL, Economics SL

ok so it’s canon that this dude is not doing very well in math but his parents made him do higher level math at first poor boy >:(

he started the year off in higher level and thought he was gonna be fine

no. he was not fine.

so he ended up switching his math hl to sl and his japanese sl to hl

IT IS CANON (special chapter in volume 19 titled “i just forgot” where bokuto has a wholeass crisis about words) that bokuto’s really one to actually really like to think about how words work and function as systems in the same way ib language courses do!!

actually having him do japanese ll hl is just an excuse for me to keep him in math sl sorry

i mean koutarou may be my fav tax evader but he really did sit through two years worth of econ classes... smh

mans is Not listening and has to rely on yukie for notes but he just memorises case studies for exams and does not do anything else

i feel like he just takes mandarin because he thought it was the easiest one... he also thinks the words sound similar so it’s easy to memorise

he’s a pretty good communicator so he practices his mandarin quite a lot. as in, he’s made friends to talk to in mandarin. we love to see it!!!

also. um. i hc that he’s pretty decent at memorisation so geography!! this goes for memorising all the kanji and mandarin characters too

i think SEHS is pretty self-explanatory. mans already known he wanna be a pro athlete might as learn about being healthy as an athlete

KUROO TESTUROU : Japanese Language and Literature SL, English B SL, Business Management HL, Chemistry HL, Math AI HL, Biology HL

now... we all know this mf been taking chemistry hl. it is CANON

and as per his career path... DEFINITELY business management hl

i feel like he’s so analytical in the way he sees things that he likes to explore many areas of knowledge where there are different ways of thinking

takes english as a second language because... whew.. aint it sexy when mans wanna be multifaceted in business

also takes higher level biology because he’d rather not with the languages... but later on i believe he ends up in a higher level language class because he might as well

i feel like kuroo’s classes just give me a vibe i know too too well...

mans takes math ai. he does not wanna fuck around with a pencil proving a theorem he just wants the answer bro

like in volleyball, he’s a quick thinker. so he’s pretty g with math and business stuff

i literally know someone with this class combo ... it’s not very chill but it screams “you never see me do any course work but i always get at least a B+ in every subject”

AKAASHI KEIJI : Japanese Language and Literature HL, French Ab Initio SL, Psychology HL, Chemistry SL, Math AA SL, Visual Arts HL

now... this subject combo radiates such pretty energy

pretty subjects for a pretty boy

he was originally going to do biology sl but then found out there is chemistry in biology so he just decided with chemistry. plain and simple.

we all know akaashi is both emotionally and academically intelligent

he’s logical and analytical, and when faced with a tough time he works through it well albeit going through a little bit of struggle

this automatically puts him in math aa... i just see him actually liking proving theorems???

but maybe he just thinks his calculator is a nuisance sometimes and would rather solve everything by hand

also art boy! this dude likes graphic design more but when it comes to traditional art he does Not Hold Back

i like to think that he’s into painting backgrounds and mixed media

if he didn’t take VA, i’m pretty sure he would take economics. because. it’s quite systematic and i think akaashi would take a liking to it

as for japanese ll hl... we all know this dude was supposed to be a part of the literary section in a magazine/manga company but was moved to editor

goes hand-in-hand with psychology, likes to know how words convey meaning and how they affect people

he also thinks french is kind of a cool language. i feel like this guy just wants to do it because it sounds cool and novel for him

all in all, pretty solid subject combo!

TSUKISHIMA KEI : Japanese Language and Literature HL, French Ab Initio SL, History HL, Biology SL, Math AA HL, Instrumental Music HL

4 hl’s... here we are folks

honestly does it for colleges to go like “holy shit this dude is kinda crazy”

but does suffer... coursework tings :)

first of all this dude takes french (even though it’s a beginner’s class) because he just loves to sound cool huh

the summer before his courses started he would have had the basics down after looking through free ib textbooks

plus, being the guy that’s super good at a new language in the class is a huge ass flex and a big ass ego boost. and anyways, with language, he thinks it’s just a lot of simple patterns working together.

this also applies to japanese ll hl... finds writing essays and making arguments ez (at least that’s what he tells himself - he’s kinda nervous when it comes to japanese but he holds on anyway)

practices extra hard on pronunciation. sounds hot tho

math aa hl??? there we go. another crazy one. thought he could ace the class at first.... no. no he couldn’t

thinks about moving down to sl. probably does. (at least it’s not math ai)

history and biology go hand in hand for him. he has significant interests in prehistoric times, and likes to learn about the origins of life - that’s a given

but he does get tired of the politics talk in history like... goddamn all these people making so many mistakes? just stop making them smh

and instrumental music was just something he got onto because he really would like to just have a course where he could enjoy himself while also learning about the stuff he likes

nobody knows what music he listens to... but i think he’s willing to listen to anything as long as it’s music and it has the kinds of vibes he digs

HAIBA LEV: Japanese Language and Literature SL, Mandarin Ab Initio SL, Psychology HL, Chemistry SL, Math AI HL, Theatre HL

i don’t know how to explain it but lev has such strong psych and chem energy

yes haiba lev’s classes are the ones i picked via roulette wheel

jk not really

here’s the thing though, lev takes psychology because he thinks econ, business management, history, ess, all that jazz is just... absolutely boring. like. super. mf-ing. boring.

so he’s like ooh cognitive processes!

kinda hates that he has to study research methods and research methods ONLY at first but when he gets the hang of it he really finds it one of his fav subs

i actually have no explanation for mandarin ab initio sl... he just seemed like the kind of guy who would wanna do the class solely because he thinks mandarin sounds cool with their intonations and everything

plus he heard that the teacher gives mooncakes every lunar new year ad he. loves. them.

okay now hear me out.

lev is good at math.

maybe not lightning speed analysis or calculations like akaashi, but he finds solving problems fun! except for when they’re without a calculator bc he HATES doing calculations by hand

he can get a bit clumsy with his hand calculations too so it’s nice to just have a calculator on hand

literally only does math ai for the sake of using a calculator at all times (a/n: i take this class, and this was the reason i took it too. COMPLETELY VALID)

and then does theatre for the fun of it!!! confidence levels high for presentations and performances... good fit

kinda thought that ib theatre would be his easy A but oh how he was wrong... hates the research tasks at first but he gets used to it

HINATA SHOUYOU: Japanese Language and Literature SL, Portuguese Ab Initio SL, SEHS HL, Geography HL, Math AI SL, Theatre HL

his classes are bokuto energy but with theatre and portuguese

MANGA SPOILERS! we all know he started thinking abt going to brazil in his second year of high school, and the ib diploma programme starts in the last two years of high school so it fits PERFECTLY

lowkey most of the boys take japanese ll sl because they just. have to.

this is also hinata’s case <3

SEHS HL!!! he has a vision for the future and it definitely involves him understanding health and sports and everything like that, especially after nationals in his first year :(((( still sad abt that

but he’s motivated for this higher level class because he’s really just gonna go all out with the research

math ai sl because... he prolly don’t give a fuck about numbers!!! (it hasn’t been made clear already, but math ai sl is the lowest level math course)

he also took theatre hl because even though he does get scared at first, he’s a natural when it comes to learning new cultures

he’s just so curious about it all and it makes him quite engaged in the class as well!!!!

also kinda took theatre because the other subjects were just not it for him

about geography... he hates memorisation but he also hates everything else in the social studies group so

he just gets by by trying to find the little details of the things he’s studying interesting because really... geography class is just the base of all the places on his bucket list

hinata’s def one of those dudes who picks his subs purely off of liking because we all know he’s going. any subject that isn’t based off of liking is usually a mandatory subject anyways

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2020recommendanime · 5 years ago

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Toilet-Bound Hanako-Kun and the Power of Visuals

Unique animation and background art can be selling points when it pertains to whether an individual decides to watch a new series. Although great story writing and characters can create an amazing series, it is difficult to know these two qualities without first watching the anime itself (as well as reading the light novel or manga). The easiest way to impress a person into watching a show without any prior knowledge is to have an interesting art style. This sort of technique is used in more than just Japanese animation, but also in other countries such as The United States with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Loving Vincent. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse brings a comic book to life by using frames and onomatopoeia words, while Loving Vincent was hand-painted using stop-motion. With these concepts, movies that would have been a simple crossover and a documentary would be dull and not cause more people to watch and marvel at what is to come. The anime and manga of Toilet-Bound Hanako-Kun do just that; the animation and background art draws people in to enjoy what is to come.

Figure 1 Persichetti, Ramsey, Rothman, “Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse”

Figure 2 Kobiela, Welchman, "Loving Vincent"

The Impact of Visuals

As with other art forms, anime has its general groups where you can expect a certain art style to go along with the concept; seinen (mature themes) are often done with more darker schemes and muted styles, shounen (aimed at boys) is brighter and smoother, hentai (animated porn) focuses on exposure and shojo (aimed at girls) is bubbly and sparkly. While there are these general groups, there are subgroups that contain their own styles, and even then, there are always exceptions. As mentioned before, Toilet-Bound Hanako-Kun is one of these exceptions.

As stated on Mangakalot, Toilet-Bound Hanako-Kun is a shounen that includes comedy, supernatural, and school life themes. With these themes, the first thought would be to compare this to shows such as Noragami and Natsume's Book of Friends. Both Noragami and Natsume's Book of Friends are stereotypical looking anime with thin lines, dry colors, and standard scenery. While these shows are impressive with their storytelling and inclusive to supernatural myths, the amount of uniqueness and creatively put into the art style does not instantly draw the viewers in.

Figure 3 Tamura, "Noragami"

Figure 4 Miyake, "Natsume's Book of Friends"

Although I can go on and describe Toilet-Bound Hanako-Kun’s animation and background, James Beckett from AnimeNewsNetwork summaries it perfectly: “The environments feel hand-crafted, like they were plucked out of an especially evocative picture-book, and the way the show uses overlays of comic panels to break up some of the gags and establishing shots makes everything even more painterly.” This kind of exceptional work is common with the producers and directors of the show. As reported from AnimeNewsNetwork, Studio Lerche employed director Masaomi Andō, writer Yasuhiro Nakanishi, character designer Mayuka Itou, and animation producer Yūji Higa. Both Masaomi Andō and Yūji Higa have previously collaborated for a child-like show, Hakumei and Mikochi. With this team, they would go forward to produce another amazing series.

Figure 5 Andou, "Hakumei and Mikochi"

There are three important factors that go into making Toilet-Bound Hanako-Kun series’ art special: manga frames, vibrant colors, and creative lighting.

Manga Frames

When discussing this subject, it is important to remember its origins. When reading manga, the frames and panels are outlined boxes stacked against each other that contain drawings and words. This concept is common across manga and comics alike but employing this type of style of boxes containing drawings is not common in anime. As referenced at the beginning, the American movie Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse uses the same notion with it being a parody towards superhero comic books. Toilet-Bound Hanako-Kun does this in a similar fashion with its manga-inspired animation.

(Below will be images for this example) Episode 6 of Toilet-Bound Hanako-Kun features many examples of manga frames, but for this example, we are focusing on a screencap from time 3:42. The screencap has two visual planes, in the background is an open book with a red page reading “Future” while in the foreground is Yashiro Nene’s, the main character, face being shown within white manga-panel borders. This image shows an interesting way to convey Yashiro talking while still being able to see what she was talking about on-screen. This scene is comparative to the one drawn in the manga. In the manga, the panel that has the book and “Future” is read first, then the next frame has Yashiro talking about what she is looking at. The way the producers decided to adapt to this scene is interesting; they were able to see the original concept and impact, but also integrated the feeling of being able to still see the first image while also continuing to read/watch on.

Figure 6 Andou, "Toilet-Bound Hanako-Kun" Ep 6

Figure 7 Aida, "Toilet-Bound Hanako-Kun" Chp 11

Vibrant Colors

Different anime may use color schemes to enhance themes, specific events, or symbolism. Color is everywhere in anime, and it is important for the animators to place certain colors in places to bring meaning or impact to the watchers. A popular example of this is in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure where the color scheme inverts at random yet important times during the episodes, which brings about the weird and unique flare that this series holds. A series does not need wild color changes to be recognizable.

The very first noticeable feature of Toilet-Bound Hanako-Kun is how bright and lively the art looks. James Beckett’s description that this show looks like a picture book is accurate in this sense. Children’s books often have bold and contrasting colors to allow for easy viewing and longer attention spans. Rachel Pancare wrote a Sciencing article title, “How Do Bright Colors Appeal to Kids?” which states, “Bright colors catch young children's eyes because they help kids to distinguish objects from one another in their field of vision. Children spend more time looking at bright colors as opposed to looking at muted shades or pastels.” While this is true, some of the tones and circumstances within the show are not child-friendly, and even then, the coloration and art style are still able to bring the fear that is needed.

Figure 8 Andou, "Toilet-Bound Hanako-Kun" Ep 1

Figure 9 Andou, "Toilet-Bound Hanako-Kun" Ep 1

Creative Lighting

Lighting can be used in many different forms; it is used to brighten a landscape, a special character or object, or to create a certain atmosphere. In the average anime, lighting may not be diverse but may be only used to brighten the landscape so that the viewers can watch. There would be no major variation or casting that would change the mood of the scene. At times, there is seemingly no direct light source, but just everything is filled with brightness by either the sun, indoor lights, or for no reason. If the setting is at night, a streetlight may light up a character but that is seemingly the only option. Incredible anime typically takes a dive into using light sources and shadows dynamically, especially when there is a dramatic scene or an object that needs to be emphasized.

Toilet-Bound Hanako-Kun possesses the traits of having various light sources and accurately placed shadows, but there is another layer that is added. An integral part of the art style is that light can take a variety of shapes, but usually hexagonal. The pictures below demonstrate this; a light that emanates from the lamps and the lenses flare are hexagons, providing a creative change other than the usual faded circle of light surrounding an object. The other light sources are the light blue, glowing gems and the sunlight from the window. These two light sources provide the rest of the scene to be lit but within proportion to how bright the source is. Shadows are used accurately as well, causing darkness on the two character’s backs as well as slopping downward on the stall doors. These small additions can contribute greatly to the finished product and can transform how a scene is seen and the feelings that are derived from it.

Figure 10 Andou, "Toilet-Bound Hanako-Kun" Ep 6

Figure 11 Andou, "Toilet-Bound Hanako-Kun" Ep 1

Conclusion

The three essential components to Toilet-Bound Hanako-Kun are creative lighting, vibrant colors, and manga frames. Analyzing and discovering what goes into a series can improve your experience and create a deeper devotion to the content. With this being said, not all shows that have the typical animation style and dull background are bad, but that they need to be analyzed in other areas and be appreciated in those. Toilet-Bound Hanako-Kun deserves praise and attention for its art style, and studios should look after this show and put forth the effort to make more series like this.

When considering what new series, you may watch or if you would want to stop watching a series, stop and think for a moment, “Does this art style impress me? Was the effort of the animators shown?” If the answers to the questions is “yes,” then I recommend that you follow through and continue watching that series. While storytelling and character development are important aspects to a show, there is more to the story than that. So, take a minute, turn the volume off on your favorite anime and watch—does the art tell a story? Does it make you laugh, scared, sad, or any emotion? Looking out for these feelings is important, and so is analyzing why this show may look so wonderful, because the smallest details matter the most, and it shows the dedication and love the creators have for the series.

#hanako-kun #toilet bound hanako kun #WINTER 2020 #anime #mini essay #manga

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obfuscobble · 6 years ago

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SO I got my hands on the Japan Animator Expo 2015 collection and I thought it a good time to rate each short because I have some very concise opinions.

1. Dragon Dentist 4/5 Girl volunteers to be a dragon's dentist in the midst of a war. Inventive, compelling, beautiful. Works incredibly well as a short, managing to tell a story far longer than its timeframe without leaving us wondering what happened or what will happen. A very strong start to the collection.

2. Hill Climb Girl 3/5 Girl wants to be a great bicyclist, and the first step is beating her friend up the hill to school. Pretty good for cel-shaded computer modelling. If you like Yowamushi Pedal, you'll like this. Not stand-out but it's an endearing.

3. ME!ME!ME! 4/5 Boy gets dunked on by his own objectification of women. A truly stand out music video not just for this collection but within the genre. That said, you do have to rewatch it closely to glean its themes and true place as a condemnation of misogyny as seen through the self empowerment male fantasies used by the boy to combat his own misogynistic fear of female desire and deep shame over his otaku life. And there is quite a lot of female objectification in his life.

4. Carnage 3/5 Gunslinging girl seeks revenge for her family and her arm. Great attention paid to the one armed gunslinging. The conclusion openly and somberly lays out what will happen next as this old town must pay for its sins, even if it perpetuates the cycle of girls losing those they love.

5. Gundam key animation 1/5 Literally the key animation drawings from Gundam shown side to side with the classic footage. Pretty cool for animation nerds and gundam fans but otherwise not really compelling as a storytelling vehicle. I have to take off points on that account, but it is really worth a watch to see the keys.

6. 20 min from Nishi Ogikubo Station 0/5 not actually 20 min long. Just kidding! 4/5 woman turns into a cockroach, much to man's dismay. The sketchy art style, soft colouring, and jittery movement add perfectly to the piece's theme, making them obviously intentional choices. The piece is still fluidly put together, with inventive plays on human/cockroach interaction and the how's of being so small. The woman as cockroach is envisioned naked, but I feel that this is presented in a naturalistic (ie she just shrunk out of her clothes) and not at all prurient way. Didn't think I was going to like it as much as I did!

7. until You come to me 1/5 Oh Shinji boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling. Shinji silently misses Kaworu or five minutes. I mean I don't blame him but... Nothing happens, and if one has no inkling about Evangelion, this short has absolutely NO meaning.

8. Tomorrow from There 3/5 Woman avoids responsibilities, calls from her mom, and the creeping sense of adult dread, until she reconnects with her inner sense of joy. A wonderful counterpoint to ME!ME!ME! that focuses on universal human fears and dilemmas, without objectifying women. Uplifting with a powerul backing song. But I have to be honest and say that its visuals aren't going to stick with me as powerfully.

9. Electronic Superhuman Gridman 3/5 You are a human with the capacity for joy and wonder, so you will appreciate this heartfelt ode to super sentai live action and robot anime. Comes complete with character design details to reflect the rubber suits and even the tiny screw to hold on the back of a model's head. Has nice internal logic about the Gridman.exe who fights monsters with the power of the electrical grid, such as circuit power ups and smashing a tv screen to get at the enemy. Even for those unfamiliar with the tropes, it's just a fun 6 minutes.

10. Yamadeloid 3/5 An ode to historical fighter anime with neat brush-line visuals and fitting soundtrack. But it just didn't grab me by my heart's cockles like Gridman did, probably coming entirely down to what shows I grew up on. It was also a lot more fourth wall breaking, which is entirely subjective for one's enjoyment, even from one short to another as you'll see. So I'd like to give it a 2, but I know that nostalgia was the only thing inflating Gridman to a 3, so I'll be fair.

11. Power Plant No 33 2/5 What if we just... turned off our millenial facebook phones... and really lived.... yanno? The instantly gripping visuals of a society powered by a beast that creates electricity, which must then go on to fight a space robot, are immediately undermined by the totes not subtle digs against modern technology. I get it, technology is literally a destructive beast. I get it, we should unplug and learn to live freely. The animation was great but the moral was giving me the feeling that I should get off a luddite's lawn.

12. Evangelion Another Impact Confidential 2/5 Tall woman looks for her daughter, finds hostile wasteland. But what a woman!

13. Kanón 3/5 A Japanese take on a Slavic philosophic parody of Jewish folk mythology, or, "On Solipsism." Actually fascinating as a piece. It moves very very quickly though, leaving little time for the jokes and philosophy to set in, but I feel the frantic pace was meant to reinforce the confused, overworked, utterly helpless feelings that the main character was experiencing. The fourth wall break right at the end completely charmed me and even elevated the piece. Loses points for the inherent misogyny of the novel it was based on, but otherwise worth a watch for the curious, and one of the most interesting Japanese takes on Judaeo-Christian tradition I've seen.

14. Sex & Violence with Machspeed 0/5 Just because you admit that you're being gross for gross' sake doesn't mean you're not gross. Look I could get into it, but I just hated this one. If you liked Panty and Stocking, maybe give it a try.

15. Obake-chan 3/5 A series of charming shorts about a girl who wants to be a spoopy ghost.

16. Tokio of the Moon's Shadow 4/5 Boy who has, I goddamn assure you, THE. SHINIEST. eyes in the universe saves earth and his radio penpal from a space creature. Come for the innovative mix of animation styles, stay for the dance sequence. Just watch it.

17. Three Fallen Witnesses 2/5 Ambition: the Anime. Like seriously, this is the 3d animation equivalent of the Ambition games. It's also a very ambitious premise, based on prosecuting attorneys using "DNA time travel" to gain evidence on a murder case. Alas, I really feel it should have had longer to play in its world and the case itself.

18. The Diary of Ochibi 3/5 Edible stop motion is here!

19. I Can Friday by Day! 5/5 Tiny space squirrels fight tiny space rabbits, each piloting robot teenagers. Highly creative, wondrously fun, and yet with a good plot and even characterisation to hold it together past the visuals. I'd love to see this as a short series, as I feel the premise, world, and character sketches could easily be filled out into a humourous and yet compelling larger narrative.

20a. ME!ME!ME! Chronic 1/5 Basically a remix. Lacking the narrative of the original hurts it because then its just boobs and yonic symbolism and the guns that shoot them. Still good music.

20b. The Making of Evangelion Another Impact Confidential 1/5 Interesting if you want to see how the short was designed and technically compiled.

21. Iconic Field 2/5 Never try to fit 13 episodes into 6 minutes. This is obviously angling to become a longer syndicated series but not only did they rush too many of their ideas and subplots into it, but they obviously ran out of money and production time. Some shots are replaced with concept sketches, and there was no voice acting when clearly it was intended to be present. It's creative in its character and mecha design, but the plot is another riff on the seeded earth hypothesis whose unanimated conclusion you can still see a mile away.

22. On a Gloomy Night Nippon Banzai! Nippon Banzai! Nippon Banzai! Nippon Banzai! Nippon Banzai! Nippon Banzai! Nippon Banzai! Nippon Banzai! Nippon Banzai! 1/5 Never try to fit 13 episodes into 6 minutes using Auld Lang Syne as your backing track.

23. Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen 1/5 Honestly not sure how to classify this one. It's about a sex worker, it's presented with a quite effective animation style, but in the end it's all about the sex worker accepting abuse from another as her tragic role in the world. Ehn.

24. Rapid Rouge 4/5 In the world of the techno-daimyo, there is only loss. BRILLIANT use of a limited colour palette. Loses one point due to not fully delivering on the emotional character-sacrifice punch it wanted and for being unartfully open ended. If it delivers on a second episode like it promises, I might amend my opinion. It was so close to being perfect, yet didn't manage to get me to care enough about its characters in its short run time, unlike...

25. Hammerhead 5/5 Highly violent, yes, but emotionally impactful to the extreme; I cried both times I've watched it. Update: three times. Wonderful traditional animation, powerful emotional centre, and perhaps the best animation I've ever seen to portray a human's physical demeanour in deep emotional distress. I absolutely recommend watching this.

26. Conte Hitman 3/5 Manzai routine with clever twists and turns. Porque no los dos, the sketch.

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parttimestorier · 6 years ago

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Short Reviews of Short Visual Novels: Halloween Edition!

With less than two weeks left until Halloween, I’m sure I’m not the only who’s in the mood to curl up with a pumpkin latte and something scary to read. Fortunately for everyone else who feels that way, I’ve been in that mood for several weeks already, so I’ve already read several spooky—or at least supernatural-themed—visual novels I can recommend! This special Halloween edition of my short reviews of short visual novels series features ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and pretty much any other creepy creature you can imagine.

Vicarwissen [VNDB|itch.io]

This entry in 2016’s Yuri Game Jam tells the story of two paranormal investigators who find themselves trapped in a creepy museum on the night that legends say the werewolf-like Vicarwissen creatures meet for a horrific banquet. I knew I would like Vicarwissen as soon as I launched it and saw the main menu, which perfectly sets the tone for the story with the image of a cellphone displaying a silly snapchat of the heroines next to a textbook about the Vicarwissen myth. The game maintains a fun balance of cute and creepy throughout, and its point-and-click elements add a lot flavour. I would have liked a little more detail about the backstory that various objects hint at, but maybe that’s something the creators could expand on in a prequel instead! I had a lot of fun with this one, so I’d certainly love to read anything else they come up with.

First Kiss at a Spooky Soirée [VNDB|itch.io]

If you want something Halloween-themed but aren’t actually into horror, look no further than First Kiss at a Spooky Soirée, from the consistently cute catalogue of NomNomNami. In this one, you play as an adorable witch named Marzipan who’s determined to get her first kiss at a party full of other magical creatures—some of whom are pretty different from what you might expect. I was especially impressed with this game’s unique CG gallery that appears like polaroids on the main menu screen. I just wish that the routes had been a little bit longer so that I could spend more time with this cast of supernatural sweethearts! Also, this was an entry in the same yuri jam as Vicarwissen, and so was one of my all-time favourite short VNs, Once on a Windswept Night—2016 was clearly good year for supernatural lesbian VNs.

Bishoujo Mangekyou: A Girl's Cursed Legend [VNDB|fan translation patch]

This Japanese VN’s fan translation patch came out just in time for the Halloween season! In the first entry of the Bishoujo Mangekyou series, a creepy teacher attempts to prey on a high school student, only for their roles to be reversed when it turns out she’s a vampire who wants to use him for a constant supply of blood. Sexual content is definitely the main focus of this one, but it has some really fun and unique h-scenes unlike anything I’ve seen in other VNs—one of my personal favourites involves the protagonist playing Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” on piano in spite of an increasing amount of distraction. And there’s still an interesting story that explores power dynamics in relationships tying it all together, plus some absolutely gorgeous art and a bit of animation. The patch does have the occasional awkward phrase or minor technical issue, but I think Euphemic Translation still did a competent job for their first release, and I’m looking forward to seeing their future efforts.

Speed Dating for Ghosts [VNDB|itch.io|Steam]

Speed Dating for Ghosts is exactly what it sounds like: a game in which you play a ghost who attends a speed dating event in hopes of meeting another ghost to go out with. Its strange, surreal world is populated with a variety of unique characters—I found all of them so intriguing that it was hard to pick which one I wanted to date first. Unfortunately, Speed Dating suffers from a lack of standard features that I’ve come to expect from other visual novels. Partway into my first playthrough I wanted to save the game, only to discover that hitting escape immediately quits to the main menu, and that there was no skip function to help me get back to where I was. But if you don’t mind those little problems, there are nine bizarre and wonderful ghosts waiting for you, each ready to take you on the date of a lifetime . . . so to speak.

Carmilla [VNDB|itch.io]

Finally, my last spooky VN recommendation involves more vampires, in a digital edition of one of the earliest vampire stories in English literature. The visual novel version of Carmilla adds an informative in-game encyclopedia, expressive sprites in anachronistic outfits, and a bit of metatextual commentary to the text of Le Fanu’s classic novella, making for a fun combination of past and present storytelling techniques. It also includes some well-done effects that accentuate the impact of the story’s creepier parts. Since developers Visual Gothic adapted the story with only minor changes, it’s a lot heavier on narration than the majority of visual novels, and I wonder if it could have improved it a bit to cut down on that a little more and take full advantage of the medium by letting the visuals speak for themselves. But of course, the original story is a classic for a reason, and I would recommend this adaptation to anyone who enjoys their horror with a bit of a slower pace.

Finally, I can’t write a real review of it because of how biased I am, but if your taste is skewed more towards silly monsters than the scary variant, you might also enjoy the demo of DemiDato! I’m one of the co-writers for this project and I can’t wait to give you the chance to meet its full cast of zany characters sometime soon. And whether you try that or another one of the VNs on this list, I hope you have a happy Halloween!

#vicarwissen #first kiss at a spooky soiree #bishoujo mangekyou #speed dating for ghosts #carmilla #visual novels #visual novel #visual novel review #Visual Novel Reviews

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deltaengineering · 6 years ago

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Bummer Anime 2018 Part 2: shoujo to the rescue

It got better, mostly because it could hardly get worse. That doesn’t mean it was a smooth ride, of course. I would like to state, for the record, that I’m not trying to be the funny guy who hates everything here; the season’s just that unusually bad. As before, the source for the ad copy at the end of each block is this.

Asobi Asobase

What: A bunch of assholes play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

✅ It’s another exuberant comedy, and unlike Chio-chan, I can’t catch this one on the execution: It has the technical chops and honestly good comedic timing.

❌❌ Initially wants to make you believe it’s a pleasant cute girls doing cute things show, but what it actually is is a brutally annoying and ugly explosion in the reactionface factory. Since the production values are there, it’s rather too good at that.

❌❌ I was trying to compare it to something, and the best I could come up with was rage comics. Yeah, it’s anime rage comics. It’s that bad.

❌❌ I would feel more benevolent towards it if it were shorter, but at full length its high energy screaming based assault is mostly just tiresome.

♎ This is one of those rare shows where even I will say your mileage may vary. It’s really good at what it does, but I hate everything it does. Hooray for the subversion, but at the end of the day you’re still annoying and ugly.

ANN sez: “It's this exact mix of stupid crassness and innocent naiveté that I think truly defines high-school life, and Asobi Asobase nails it perfectly. “

Hyakuren no Haou to Seiyaku no Valkyria

What: A smartphone with a light novel protagonist attached time travels to the bronze age, establishes a incest-fascist harem regime with the power of Wikipedia.

❌❌ read the synopsis again please

❌❌ there’s more idiocy than that, believe it or not (ex.: smartphone hotline to his actual imouto, for the feels), but I haven’t got all day.

❌❌ Basing your isekai shit on “history” (i.e., a LN author’s idiotic idea of history) instead of an MMO or whatever only serves to piss me off even more.

❌❌ Actually not better than Isekai Smartphone, which makes it one of the worst anime episodes I have ever seen. Congratulations. The only thing it has over Death March is that it doesn’t spend 80% of the time in menus, but it makes menus look pretty good so it’s a wash.

ANN brainfarts: “Yuuto also seems to be limiting his phone searches to historically accurate things as well, which shows that he's really thinking about the fact that he's in the past – no one's inventing the rocket here, they're just learning to grind grain and use the phalanx formation for battles.”

Phantom in the Twilight

What: Chinese girl travels to London, inadvertently inherits her great-grandma’s vampire harem.

✅ Step 1 of every otome harem appraisal is determining how much of a wet blanket the protagonist is; Ton here is pretty spunky and even gets to kick some ass, so well done on that.

✅ Some of the right kind of nonsense for my taste, stuff like chav goblins and Jiangshi with miniguns is always appreciated.

✅ Random shows ending up with bizarre minimal techno soundtracks is still something that I approve of.

❌ Still not the glorious kind of nonsense that Dance With Devils had, nor the disregard of actual romance in favor of comedy that Dame x Prince exhibited. It’s an otome-ass otome harem and that’s not inspiring confidence for the long term.

❌ Looks cheap, and that won’t be getting any better.

ANN sez: “The fantasy worldbuilding here also felt far more sturdy than in many similar shows; this isn't a world where the Good Fantasy Guys fight the Bad Fantasy Guys, this is a world where creatures like goblins and spriggans and werewolves all exist, all possess their own cultures and priorities, and uneasily rub shoulders with each other.”

Jashin-chan Dropkick

What: Demon snake girl wants to murder the chuuni gothloli that summoned her, gets owned right back.

❌❌ It’s the second coming of Dokuro-chan, with every punchline being torture. Quite literally for the characters, and consequently for the audience as well.

❌❌ Needless to say, the entire cast (there’s some additional supernatural babes, none of which make much of an impression) are jerks and the show being wantonly mean-spirited towards them does not cancel that out.

❌ Somehow the second anime about eating reptile ass in recent memory. But Maidragon, as lame as it was, wasn’t as terrible as this. Jashin-chan won’t get into insipid family feels any time soon, but the alternative is worse.

ANN sez: “If this is your taste in humor, it may be worth giving a second episode to see if it starts pulling that off.”

Kyoto Teramachi Sanjou no Holmes

What: Handsome genius antique dealer appraises old pottery and his assistant’s soul.

✅ I have to admit that if you somehow decided to make a otome version of Sherlock without anything so crass as murder, this is how you’d do it. It works.

✅ The leading pair has simple but effective chemistry.

✅ The studio behind it has mostly done porn OVAs before, which is the kind of meta-humor I can get behind.

❌ Based on a series of novels, so naturally the talkytalk gets out of hand.

❌ Doesn’t have the highest budget, tries to make up for it with rainbow-colored garishness. Not a dealbreaker but it could get tiresome.

ANN sez: “While Yagashira cuts a handsome figure as the bishonen, Aoi has more of an ordinary appearance – perhaps deliberately so, since I suspect that the source novels were originally aimed at female audiences.”

Shinya! Tensai Bakabon

What: Showa-era gag manga gets on air again after decades, repeatedly points out how hilarious that is.

❌ Beat-for-beat the same first episode concept as Osomatsu-san.

❌ The main difference is that Bakabon is more willing to look old as fuck, but when they arrive at the non-ruse look at the end of the episode, it’s the same as the non-ruse look that Osomatsu-san ended up at the end of its own first episode.

❌ So guess what, constantly takes potshots at Osomatsu-san, despite being a blatant ripoff of it.

❌❌ When it doesn’t reference Things You Know (if you’re a middle-aged Japanese salaryman), it references its own sorry showa-era gag manga self.

❌❌ I didn’t even like Osomatsu-san but this is an embarrassment.

♎ On the bright side, not as likely to provide fujos with incest shipping material. I fully expect to be proven painfully wrong on this.

ANN sez: Nothing. Way too Japanese for them, I suppose.

Angolmois - Genkou Kassenki

What: Historical action show wherein a bunch of misfits in medieval Japan fight the Mongols.

✅ Fairly decent action and animation thereof.

✅ Characters seem alright for this sort of thing. Maybe a bit too tryhard violent for my tastes, but that’s still within acceptable parameters.

❌❌ The looks are ruined in postproduction. I could live with the heavyhanded color correction, but what really kills it is the same omnipresent static paper texture over every single shot. It’s bad when it doesn’t change between shots but it’s devastating when it doesn’t move along with zooms and pans, which this show has a lot of.

❌❌ Seriously, I haven’t seen anything as senselessly destroyed by a single AfterEffects layer since Garo: Vanishing Line’s Parkinsonscam, but at least that only affected impact frames. Here it’s literally every frame. Delete that PNG you damn fools.

❌ So yeah, it’s okay-ish but that’s not enough to survive one boneheaded executive decision that’s impossible to ignore. It just comes out as a net negative.

ANN sez: “From its beautifully animated, choreographed, and directed fight scenes to its generally dynamic compositions and keen understanding of visual economy, Angolmois is a visually stunning production.”

Lord of Vermilion - Guren no Ou

What: Tokyo gets enveloped in red mist which raptures most of the population and turns the rest into JRPG characters. They start fighting, we promise.

❌ Has the shape of an obvious Persona clone, but isn’t one; it’s actually based on an arcade CCG. So the source material isn’t very classy to begin with.

❌❌ Haphazardly thrown together so it’s hard to care about anything, especially not the characters.

❌❌ Opens with a flashforward to the climax, so we know this will just end up as overdesigned dudes and dudettes having allegedly epic battles that the show can’t afford to make look good, but can afford to make very red. Thanks for the heads up, I guess.

❌ So it’s quite bad, and not even funny-bad like Caligula was.

ANN sez: “There are always a few action shows like this every season, and they're always entirely overshadowed by that season's versions of shows like My Hero Academia and Banana Fish”

Grand Blue

What: City slicker moves to a beach town expecting to end up in Amanchu; ends up in Animal House instead.

❌❌ Say it with me: Every punchline is the protagonist making a shocked face at dumb meatheads doing something stupid.

♎ For something that I feel like I should hate every second of, I actually didn’t hate it all that much. I even thought it was mostly sort of enjoyable. I don’t really know what exactly does it but I can offer some ideas:

✅ While the punchlines (well, punchline) may be bad, the jokes themselves aren’t. This is a real sitcom with larger-scale comedic setups than you usually see in anime, jokes build upon each other and keep escalating.

✅ Sleazy fratboy humor about partying hard and drinking like an idiot isn’t very profound, but rare at least in anime. And it’s amusing that the overall conceit is that it’s preventing iyashikei from taking place. Novelty counts for something.

✅ Manages to build awkward comedic situations about buff dudes with their dicks out without resorting to the same old gay panic jokes. Just regular panic, no homo.

✅ Makes a good Friday beach bum combo with Harukana Receive, which incidentally also got better by embracing its more prurient side.

ANN sez: “If Grand Blue Dreaming has a major Achilles heel, its that it isn't self-aware enough to recognize when a joke has run its course. ”

Happy Sugar Life

What: Yandere sociopath adopts a preteen girl (from a parking lot). It’s cute, only not.

✅ Is fully aware that everyone in this show is an asshole and is honestly trying for subversive. At least on the surface.

✅ Goes all on on the imagery, which works. At least on the surface.

❌❌ Simply exploiting the contrast between cuteness and insanity got old about a decade ago; this cranks up the presentation on both sides but doesn’t really add anything new.

❌❌ About as mean-spirited and unpleasant as Mahou Shoujo Site, while having even less to say.

❌ Doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere; it’s just going to be the main character pwning other people that are just as flamboyantly fucked up as she is, but not as good at it. Starting with a flashforward to the (very edgy, of course) ending like Lord of Vermilion doesn’t help either. And even if they end up rusemanning what is implied there it won’t be much better.

ANN sez: “Happy Sugar Life was on my list of most-anticipated anime this season because its combination of disparate elements seemed so utterly perverse that I was curious to see how they could possibly fit together.“

Shoujo Kageki Revue Starlight

What: Girls slowwalk in an academy for stage arts by day, get into metaphorical superbattles by night.

✅✅ What can I say, it’s Love Live x Marimite with a glossy coating of Ikuhara-style operatics. A total deltabait concept if I’ve ever seen one.

✅ Clones the storytelling approach of Ikuhara but not many of his specific directing mannerisms; Since I’m tired of the latter but a sucker for the former, this is a good thing.

✅ In a similar vein, this trades Ikuhara’s functional ciphers for actual characters and his enigmatic arthouse plots for something that obviously makes sense.

✅ How gay? So gay.

❌ Has the opposite problem of Grand Blue: This is a show that should blow me away, but doesn’t. In fact, if it didn’t bring the big damn musical theater complete with one of the best and most appropriate henshins I’ve ever seen near the end, I’d say it was fairly lame.

❌ Probably has something to do with that in the course of casualizing Ikuhara, the “real” world ended up too bland and the characters too generic. I get that it’s for contrast, but it can be done far better (see Yorimoi for an example).

✅ In any case, it still seems easily worth watching even if it’s not as good as it could be. Maybe it’ll even get better.

ANN sez: “All I can say for certain is that it comes completely out of nowhere, and that it raises all kinds of questions about what kind of series this is going to be.“

Yuragi-sou no Yuuna-san

What: Impoverished ghost hunter checks into a haunted hot spring and interacts with the harem that happens to live there.

❌ As generic a 90s ecchi harem comedy as they come; my correspondents tell me that this is extremely reminiscent of Love Hina. Shockingly it’s actually based on a 2016 manga, but you wouldn’t be able to tell.

❌ As such, an abundance of accidental boobplants and other saucy accidents makes up the bulk of what’s going on this show.

✅ The main ghost girl is fairly cute; The main dude is also relatively bearable and has at least one good joke in his backstory (which I won’t spoil), so the core dynamic is surprisingly fine. If the rest of the harem weren’t there, this wouldn’t be such a bad setup.

❌ Features those dastardly breast-hiding light rays, reportedly even in the AT-X version. This doesn’t affect a large part of the show (the majority is more like the cap above), but boobies are probably still the only reason anyone cares about any of this.

♎ Certainly not good, but the lame shit of yore is not what I’m going to spend energy getting mad at in 2018. The 24 minutes I’m ever going to spend with it felt more nostalgic than anything.

ANN sez: “Ninja girl Sagiri comes off the worst from the situation, with nearly all of her dialogue spent promising to beat the crap out of anyone who doesn't measure up to her moral code. I imagine there must be more to her and the rest of the supporting cast than what we've seen so far, but at the moment they seem an awful lot like stock characters.”

Sirius the Jaeger

What: A broody werewolf and his team of assorted bad dudes hunt vampires in 30s Tokyo.

✅✅ Looks ace, this is an action show with deluxe everything. It better, because being directed by Masahiro Ando is pretty much the start and end of this show’s unique selling points.

✅ Interwar Tokyo with a bit of a gothick twist is a cool setting, and this show can afford to portray it properly.

❌ Seriously though... edgy vampires and edgier werewolves. Come on, son.

❌ Just like Banana Fish, this is a highly polished implementation of something that fundamentally isn’t very interesting to me.

✅ I’d still take it over Fanana Bish because this doesn’t seem to take itself so bloody seriously and is far more comfortable with just being moody action schlock. It’s also less showoffy, believe it or not. What else are you going to watch? Sirius the Jaeger is what you’re going to watch. Sorry.

ANN sez: They only have a preview from Anime Expo, and that boils down to “The second episode is where things start to get interesting.“ I sure hope so.

Well, we got a few acceptable shows in if nothing else, I’ll leave it up to you to figure out which ones those are. I’m cutting my losses here, see you in three months for a hopefully more bountiful season.

#anime #summer2018 #impressions #Asobi Asobase #Hyakuren no Haou to Seiyaku no Valkyria #Jashin-chan Dropkick #Phantom in the Twilight #Kyoto Teramachi Sanjou no Holmes #Shinya! Tensai Bakabon #Angolmois - Genkou Kassenki #Lord of Vermilion - Guren no Ou #grand blue #happy sugar life #Shoujo Kageki Revue Starlight #Yuragi-sou no Yuuna-san #sirius the jaeger

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forthegothicheroine · 8 years ago

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Kamigami No Asobi recap, episode 2: You’ve Met the Best, Now Meet the Rest

As I understand it, this anime was based on a visual novel, which explains a lot; shows adapted from games have to either pick one of the routes or make up their own, and they simply can’t focus on everyone with multiple endings. As such, some characters are going to get the short end of the stick.

It’s time to meet those characters!

We open on Apollo sweeping Yui off her feet for a cheek kiss, much to her shock and consternation. Apollo has a very shaky understanding of the concept that maybe not all girls want to kiss him, and so is quite thrown by this. He tries to claim that it’s how people greet each other where he comes from, and it’s all a big misunderstanding due to her being Japanese. (Do I have any Greek readers? Can you confirm if this is bullshit?)

Apollo does his best to smooth this over by whistling for Pegasus, on the theory that pretty winged horses make girls happy. She bonds with the horse, and Apollo comes up with the first of many irritating nicknames he will give to characters on this show. He asks if he can call her Fairy, and I’m a little confused by why Apollo of all people would ask this. I assume it’s either a pun in Japanese that I don’t get, or else the word he’s trying to call her is Nymph and it’s being poorly translated.

At least this nickname is flattering. They will get worse.

Balder watches jealously as Apollo and Yui have a romantic Pegasus ride, setting up our main romantic rivalry. Balder and Apollo are going to be the cheif contendors for Yui’s heart, so get ready to see a lot of the Blonde Bishie Bunch.

Zeus finally deigns to make another appearance, imperious as always. As a side note, I like to think about him talking to Hera about this project before it started.

“I’m off to abduct a teenage girl-”

“You know I’m just going to kill her, right?”

“-and use her to make Hades and Apollo look like idiots.”

“Ah, my mistake. Carry on the good work!”

Anyway, back to the show. He addresses all of the gods (calling Loki the god of fire, which...is not the way I usually hear Loki described), and we get a glimpse of the gods not important enough to be featured in the first episode, Thor and Dionysus.

Contrary to most depictions, Thor is more otter than bear in physique. He also has a really stupid green undercut with a lightening bolt shaved into the side. I am positive Loki did this to him while he was asleep and he still hasn’t noticed.

Dionysus is called the “god of fertility”, and I’m not even going to begin to address that. His poofy pink mullet is the second-worst hair on the show after Loki’s, but I’m perfectly willing to believe Dionysus cycles through different raver hairstyles as the whim strikes him. I hope another whim strikes him soon.

There’s also a brief glimpse of Anubis, but we won’t get a good look at him for a while yet.

I’ve got to ask, in the development of this show (or the game it was based on), did they ever consider having Jesus? I know he shows up in Ruroni Kenshin and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, so there’s precedent. It’s not that I want Bishie Anime Jesus, I just want to know if they got to the concept art stage with him.

Also, let’s address the elephant in the room: this is a romance anime, and like half of these gods have wives. There are three possible ways to think about this:

The gods are cheating (or want to cheat) on their wives with Yui. This makes me sad, but I guess it happens in myths all the time…

This show takes place in a universe where those marriages didn’t happen. This seems the most likely, given that the rest of the plot plays fast and loose with mythological retcons, but also throws everything I think I might know about anyone’s backstory into chaos.

Zeus didn’t abduct adult gods and de-age them- he actually abducted their teenage selves. Hades hasn’t kidnapped Persephone yet, Dionysis hasn’t waylaid Ariadne yet. This theory brings up more questions than it answers, but I kind of like it.

Anyway, pick a theory and let’s move on.

With the exception of Apollo, the other gods vehemently do not want to participate in Zeus’ dating sim. Sucks to be them, because he responds to this rebellion by putting magical shackles in the form of accessories on everyone, keeping them from using their full godly powers until they have learned about humanity and love. Not only that, but they’re going to have a full on High School AU where they have to attend classes and graduate in order to get out of their prison, with all the students other than the gods and Yui being some kind of weird fairy energy constructs. Enjoy calculus, Loki!

Zeus is having way too much fun here.

We now meet the man in the shadows from last episode, Hot Dad Number Two, Who Does What the Goddesses Love, Thoth.

I have to say, I’m willing to give this whole project a little more respect if Thoth is in on it. He probably wants a better outcome than just amusement. Anyway, he’s going to be their teacher, which would be great if he wasn’t so into sexual harassy violations of personal space, but we’ll get to that later.

And by later I mean now. Walking in the hallway with him, Yui protests that this is all somewhat silly, and he responds by pushing her up against a wall, his coat billowing and his chest bare. Yes, the things he has to tell her are reassuring- that she’ll be restored to the exact time she came from, and that the magical girl sword necklace is eventually going to come in handy- but he did it in the least reassuring way imaginable.

When Yui goes to her new dorm room she meets Melissa, a horrifying sentient deep-voiced ragdoll Zeus accidentally created and then sent to be her friend. Don’t ask me, I got nothing.

Meanwhile the gods are complaining, although they have a really awesome dorm with a hot spring so I don’t feel too sorry for them.

At their first group meeting for school, Balder quizzes Yui about her relationship with Apollo. She tells him that duh, they’ve all just been here for a single day, and he gloats that this means he met her first. This conversation is innocent enough for now, but plants the hint that Balder may not be all sunshine and light. Even though he is, in a literal sense, all sunshine and light.

The complete list of gods who bother to show up for this end up being him, Apollo and Tsukito. They then go looking for the others, and find that Loki has drawn a dick on Takeru’s face while he was asleep.

Okay, so it’s actually a fish. But it’s spiritually a dick.

When Yui tries to rope Hades in, he gives her more of his Edward-Cullen-but-cuter act, about how getting close to him will only bring her sorrow. Thor says, and I quote, “If Loki isn’t going then I don’t need to.” (‘But Loki did it!’ is a bad excuse for anything.) At least they manage to get Dionysus, but my joy over that is marred by the fact that Apollo calls him Dee-Dee.

He is going to call him that for the entire rest of the show.

And so our heroes face the opening cermony with dignity and, in Apollo’s case, hope for an enjoyable year. Apollo has clearly never been to high school before.

Ragnarok Clock

No closer than last time, but Loki and Thor do have an ominous conversation about their “destiny” regarding Balder.

Where is Odin? During this episode, Odin is attending a performance of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, embarrassing Frigg by standing up every half hour and yelling “Get on with it!”

Team ___: Team Tsukito. There’s a bit where he asks if the school’s opening ceremony will require a human sacrifice, and I find that charming.

Does Thoth push Yui up against a wall? Yes.

#kamigami no asobi

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jgfiles · 8 years ago

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Re-watching Joker Game: Ep 2 Joker Game Part 2

So, as I proposed a re-watching, here I go doing the re-watching. Hopefully someone else will join! ^_-

Mind you, what follows are my ramblings over Ep 2, comprehensive of my impression on how the frames were structured and so on with some occasional reference to the other Joker Game media.

Also, for personal comfort, I’ll use the characters’ names even if the anime hasn’t stated them yet. In short, as this is a re-watching and not a first watching, you’ll also get a telling that’s mixed with my knowledge of the future. Consider yourself warned.

And now, let’s start.

The musical background is ‘Sakudō’ [策動 Planning] which, I guess, is meaningful of what we’re going to be shown… even though it might not exactly seems so at first glance.

In fact Ep 2 starts with showing us… a photo of a newborn baby…

…no, actually what we’re seeing is only part of a photo of a family, father, a soldier in uniform, mother in a traditional kimono and the newborn baby in his mother’s arms. The father’s uniform is the old one so it’s clear this picture was taken prior to the fact we saw being played in the previous episode of ‘Joker Game’.

We go on with many scenes of daily life for children.

We see children playing, at school, reading tales… they might seem very ordinary scenes but actually, everything in them is tinged with reference to the Army. Starting from the father that was a soldier in uniform we see that the Menko (cards) the children are playing with depict soldiers,

…the children chasing each other are actually playing war wearing helmets and chasing ‘enemies’ with toy rifles…

…at school they draw on the blackboard soldiers, military ships and military planes…

…they read magazines about soldiers…

…they play with a toy military aeroplane…

…watches soldiers parade with excitement and bows to them…

…and, in the end, they’re taught to bow to the portrait of the emperor, who’s in his military attire…

All this while a voice reciting the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors (軍人勅諭 Gunjin Chokuyu “Imperial commander”) is the REAL background music to the scene, way more than ‘Sakudō’ is. The rescript is repeated TWICE but it’s as if it flows continuously and, if you’re not familiar with it, you won’t really realize when it ends and when it starts anew, it penetrates the scenes, showing us how it’s subtly shaping the children’s minds as, at a certain point, we see don’t see the children anymore but we see a Military Academy School Principal reading the rescript to soldiers in a military academy and, among those soldiers in the military academy, listening to the rescript, there’s Sakuma.

And now we can realize he was among the children, that he likely was the baby we saw at the beginning, we basically were shown how he grew up in a world where everything revolved around the Army and how he ended up embracing this as, not only we see him being in a military academy but, the next scene shows him reading out loud the rescript with firmness.

The plan to make him a perfect Imperial Army soldier came to its end. Sakuma has embraced the Army life and the Army beliefs, probably without even realizing it. They had permeated all his life and now they’re part of him. The planning of Sakuma, the soldier, has ended with a success. Sakuma now lives according to the beliefs in which they wanted him to believe.

A side note here. For western viewers it can be a little hard to realize the children are bowing to the Imperial Portrait because the visual doesn’t show clearly to what they’re bowing. That’s because it’s taboo to have the emperor and his family portrayed in Japanese media unless it’s for historical, educational, or informative purposes, hence the anime couldn’t show us the picture of the emperor as a whole. For a Japanese person it would be easy enough to figure that’s the Imperial Portrait. For us, the fact that the photos are obscured and that, later, we’ll see only a particular of the emperor’s photo, his hand, makes things much harder. It couldn’t be helped though, so let’s not complain about this.

‘Kikan’ [機関 Agency] starts and we gets Sakuma telling us a shortened version of his explanation of what D Agency is that he gave us in the past episode. This summarized version will become the version we’ll hear at the beginning of each episode.

It’s worth to note though that in the previous narration Sakuma ended with ‘And then, finally, only eight students remained. No… eight monsters.’ while now he says ‘And so a brand-new intelligence agency was created. It’s name is D-Agency.’ The change sort of remarks how before the boys were still… in training… but now… now they’re effective members of D Agency, spies. Training time has come to a end, they’re at their first mission. They’re spies of D Agency.

The scenes that are shown during this don’t tell us much as they’re just scenes we saw in the previous episode of the boys’ training when the longer monologue was played. In the future episodes, when this summary will be repeated, the scenes that will be played will always be different but will continue not telling us much as they’ll always be a ‘summary’ of the past episode. This bit will become just a recurring bit to introduce each Joker Game episode. In a way it remarks its episodic nature and how one can pick up on watching it at whatever point in the story and still get it just fine.

Then this ends and we get…

…the opening, with the music of ‘Reason Triangle’ by Quadrangle and that’s exactly the same it was for Ep 1 and will remain the same through all the episodes, only now we can recognize almost everyone, not just Sakuma.

This leads us to realize that the spies are presented in the opening in a manner that’s different from Sakuma, as if to remark he’s not one of them. We’ve Miyoshi, then Kaminaga and Odagiri, who all had a relevant role in the past episode.

A break and then we meet Amari and Hatano… and while Amari did get to do something in the past episode… well Hatano didn’t really had a role so gold star to who remembered him.

Then we’ve our boy, Sakuma, and then Jitsui, Fukumoto and Tazaki who, again, had little role in the past episode… and then a guy we still hadn’t meet, Gamō. He’s presented in the same manner as the other spies and I’ve already mentioned how we’ve an effect as if a shoot breaks a mirror… as if we were actually seeing him through a mirror which is a nice hint that Gamō will at first looks to us as if he were one of the D Agency boys, but then we’ll discover he’s not…

This trick works even better because in the official web Gamō is listed as one of the main characters (though back then his profile reported less info) and who’s familiar with the novel or the ‘D no Maō’ manga might have known Gamō WAS one of the D boys. We might even end up thinking that the shoot is a hint that ‘Joker Game’ is going to change things and kill him, not to have him being from another agency.

Oh, and there’s Yūki, of course. It’s interesting how we’ll have a picture showing half the face of the 11 main characters (they included Sakuma and Gamō) but then we’ll see that in the ending picture that they won’t be among the ones who will collect around Yūki. Another hint those two won’t become D Agency spies.

Anyway the opening ends and we resume with ‘Joker Game’.

Well, actually we get a ‘flashback’ of around 1 minutes and 20 second of the search through Gordon house, how this is the second time they searches his house, how the boys come up empty and how Sakuma realizes there was nothing for them to find and that he might have been the one who drew out the joker again.

Nothing really noteworthy here, in short it’s just an attempt to refresh our memory on what happened in the previous episode.

I’ll say the episode’s story truly start when we see Sakuma sitting on the ground, legs crossed while ‘Kinan’ [危難 Danger] is playing. Fitting BGM by the way, considering the situation.

Well, we don’t quite know it’s Sakuma the one who’s seated as he’s giving us his back but we can guess. The camera, and therefore our gaze, is at Sakuma’s level. We can see the legs of everyone else and they seem more imposing and taller than they really are.

Sakuma is doing something calmly though. It takes little to realize he’s unlatching the buttons of his jacket and undershirt and leaving them open. Yes, he’s leaving his stomach exposed and he’s doing it with calm and firmness because yes, Sakuma is going to commit Harakiri and he’s going to do it without showing a ounce of fear. Although in the past episode we saw he wasn’t exactly happy and serene with this development, now we can see he’s not hesitating. If before he was worried he might have drawn the joker again… well, now he’s not worried anymore. He’s decided.

The camera moves to face him. Even if the camera is slightly over him (and we can see he has disposed of his weapons and his hat as well as… well, enjoy the view of his abs as it’s worth mentioning Sakuma has a very nice body… ^_^;;;) we can see Sakuma is perfectly composed and concentrated. This guy is ready to go through this, he won’t hesitate. Sakuma is a cool guy.

The camera moves to show us the others who’re watching. Behind Sakuma we can see that Gordon is basically gleeful. No idea why he’s behind Sakuma though, as if he so much want to see the show he should stand in front of him. Well, okay, visually for the anime later it’ll work better if he’s behind Sakuma… but I’d like to have a rational plot reason for this as well. Let’s assume maybe he’s afraid to be sprayed with blood, okay?

The camera is only slightly below Gordon. Next to him we see there’s Miyoshi whose expression is exactly the opposite. Miyoshi isn’t smiling anymore and his eyes are hidden by the visor. While he’s not looking upset… well, he lacks the serene air Sakuma has.

The next scene shows the others. They’re standing in front of Sakuma and they’re… more or less like Miyoshi. Eyes obscured by the visor and lack of smile. They aren’t upset but they aren’t even serenely calm.

They seem more… like impersonal judges, though I don’t think they’re there to judge Sakuma… or anyone else. I’ve said it many times (here, here and here and probably somewhere else too… ^_^;) but I don’t think the plan was to allow Sakuma to commit Harakiri. I’m more in the camp of them not thinking that he would go and sit down and prepare to commit Harakiri and once he instead sit down and prepared himself to commit it they were all ‘ops, now who stops him?’. It helps ‘D no Maō’ had Miyoshi personally stop him from committing it.

So yes, I think that is Sakuma hadn’t figured out things they would have stopped him before he were to commit Harakiri. But anyway let’s go back with the episode because Sakuma is about to be awesome.

Sakuma calmly takes his sword and brings it in front of himself.

Now… I’m not an expert but when he holds the sword in front of himself he reminds me of someone doing the ToRei (刀礼 “salute to the sword”) but it might be just me. Sakuma’s ritual suicide isn’t exactly following the ritual as we know it. He’s not in Seiza position, he’s keeping the sword at his side and not in front of himself (though it seems in some versions one keeps it at his side), he’s not cleansing the sword with water and… well, normally you don’t use a sword but a Tanto (a knife Samurai style) or a Wakizashi (a short sword) because to do it right, you need a shorter blade.

If you think you can stomach this sort of things there’s an interesting short film by Mishima Yukio depicting First Lieutenant Takeyama Shinji committing ritual suicide in 1936 (which would be 3 years before this episode takes place). The movie is called Yūkoku (憂國 “Patriotism”), it’s dated 1961 and you can find the suicide scene on youtube here.

If you’ll watch the movie you’ll see that, even with a Wakizashi, you’ll wrap the blade with cloth because you’ll have to perform it by holding the blade (remember? There’s the length problem here, that’s double with a Katana that’s longer than a Wakizashi) and if Sakuma doesn’t do it and his Katana is something like remotely sharp… well, he’ll end up cutting his fingers away before managing to cut his belly… -_-;;;

To be honest maybe Sakuma was, first preparing himself spiritually (the manga seems to imply this), hence the cross-legged position instead than seiza, and then he was about to prepare his sword when he took it from his side (where’s the water though? Or something with which he could wrap the blade?), when it dawned on him what had happened and called the whole Harakiri thing off. In short, the cutting part was still a bit far away and we just were lulled into the idea that it was about to happen because we don’t know about all the details of the ritual…

Or the ‘Joker Game’ staff didn’t check all those small details but merely copied the scene from the ‘D no Maō’ manga where again Sakuma is sitting cross-legged and is trying to stab himself with a sword by holding it by the Tsuka (柄 “hilt”).

Or maybe Sakuma is following another version of the ritual. Although it was codified in Edo time… well, it was practiced by a longer time and the code went through some variations. I saw Japanese pictures depicting Harakiri done by people sitting cross-legged so… no idea, sorry.

I don’t know, I couldn’t find info about the staff talking of how Sakuma was going to commit suicide, if someone has them or can request for them I would love it if he were to share.

Anyway, Sakuma is about to unsheathe his Katana when…

No… let’s stop here for a moment and go back a little. Remember how the previous episode ended with the camera high over Sakuma? As Sakuma is about to commit suicide… well, the camera is not so high over him. When we saw him from behind, at the beginning, it was on his same level. Yes, we got everyone else was towering over him but the camera didn’t present Sakuma as someone in a low position. He was acting with honour, he was going through this.

The camera is slightly above him when we stare at him from the front, but only slightly. It’s more to tell us that Sakuma is about to ‘humbly take responsibility’ than to tell us that this man is below our gaze.

When Sakuma bring his sword in front of himself the camera takes care to be placed at a distance, and probably on a rather low position, so that it can film everyone and look more or less at the same level with everyone.

Although Sakuma is the only one who’s sitting down and therefore below everyone else, the visual doesn’t depict him as someone who’s symbolically below everyone else. He’s calm, he’s in control, he’s on an even level with the camera. Sakuma is going through this as cool as it’s humanly possible.

The camera remains at the same level as Sakuma when he unsheathes the sword. Even though Sakuma has been forced into this… the visual isn’t depicting a helpless and scared man but a calm and confident man who’s going through this with dignity and honour. In this he’s strongly different from the Sakuma of ‘D no Maō’ who was tormented by doubts that what he was doing was useless and was even trembling. Anime Sakuma is closer to his novel counterpart who was calmly thinking to commit Harakiri until he figured out things (though he figured the out sooner than anime Sakuma… novel Sakuma is the most awesome Sakuma among the bunch, though I love them all…)

Anyway, as I was saying, Sakuma unsheathes the sword and sees… the light.

Well, actually it’s just a SMART visual effect. As soon as the Katana starts slipping out of the scabbard the blade reflects the light… only the anime turns this light into… well, basically a blinding light as everything becomes white.

In this white background the memory of Yūki warning Sakuma that killing or committing suicide would be bad choices comes to his mind. We can really say he ‘saw the light’ even in a metaphorical way.

‘Dasshutsu’ [脱出 Escape] begins to play as Sakuma is about to find a way to escape committing Harakiri.

Sakuma’s eyes widens and he remembers bits of his experiences at D Agency, Yūki repeating his words that spies are cowards/unfair, Miyoshi commenting they weren’t playing poker, Yūki telling him that Japan was so worried about the rules for the façade it never noticed the nature of the game being played, Miyoshi explaining him what tautology is, Yūki remarking that the spies will have to make them invisible when they’ll be scattered around the world.

All the while the visual overlays on Sakuma’s memories cards falling from above until the Joker appears and that will be when Sakuma will realize things. It’s smart because while the past time the falling cards were used to imply Sakuma had drawn the joker again, here they subtly imply this time Sakuma managed to play the joker game correctly.

A break here.

The previous episode in its final draft cut out the scene in which they discussed about the Tennosei system and the respect that the Army pays to the emperor. It wasn’t an exactly minor cut as the cipher is hidden behind the IMPERIAL PORTRAIT and no one in the Military Police had checked the portrait exactly due to the belief the emperor is a god and his portrait is something venerable. From the novel is also cut the part in which it was mentioned that people who had dared to touch the portrait had then been forced to commit suicide due to social pressure. In short, apart from the children bowing to the emperor, we had really little in regard to how devoted to the emperor the people in the Army were.

So the anime really had to do its best with what it had to help us realize how Sakuma figured out things.

First we had Sakuma reminding how Yūki was against killing or committing suicide because it would leave behind a corpse. It’s a hint the boys didn’t want Sakuma to become a corpse because they were taught to avoid leaving corpses behind. This is not D Agency way. So why did Miyoshi set up such situation?

The second memory might be the answer. Because Sakuma has accused spies of being coward so Miyoshi wanted to see if he was better than them. Is it just this?

The third memory is of Miyoshi, telling him he wasn’t playing the game Sakuma was thinking he was playing, and the forth is of Yūki telling him of how Japan was too worried with the rules of the façade to realize what was going on. Sakuma too, in a way, had been so worried to play along the rules he had been taught, he hadn’t realized the boys might not want him to commit suicide, he hadn’t realized that the boys were ‘playing a different game’ from the one he was thinking they were playing. They weren’t there planning to act as Military Police, but as spies.

So? So Sakuma wasn’t just only worried by the rules that dictated he would commit Harakiri, but also by others. The memory of Miyoshi reminding him what tautology is, of how they can end up worshipping the wrong thing due to faith combined with the one of Yūki reminding him of how spies will have to make them invisible does the trick.

Yūki always rambled about how spies should make themselves invisible and yet he sent them out in plain sight. Yūki and the boys should know about Mutō inspecting the place and finding nothing… that’s why Yūki sent them like this, because like this Gordon would lower his guard. But which was the purpose of having Gordon lower his guard if the place had been inspected already and nothing was found? To have Sakuma commit suicide? No, that was just Miyoshi’s twisted idea of a funny joke, they actually were there because the cipher was really there, hidden somewhere, and if the Military Police hadn’t found it, it was because the cipher was hidden somewhere that would make it invisible to their eyes due to their faith, their rules.

And so Sakuma finally can do the connection between invisible people and invisible places. Where would he never look due to the teaching he went through? Due to his faith?

His eyes widen again and another memory comes to his mind. We saw it at the beginning of the episode. Him being taught to bow to the imperial portrait from a very young age.

Another memory dawns on him, the photos showing how Gordon also worships the portrait of the emperor. Remember how there were two of them as to it that was important?

Anyway Gordon worshipping the portrait wouldn’t be bad per se, if Gordon was really just a Japanese enthusiast it would make sense Gordon might have decided worshipping the emperor as well… but Gordon is a spy hiding himself behind the façade of the Japanese enthusiast… so his faith can’t be sincere. Someone really devoted to the emperor wouldn’t hand Japanese ciphers to Japan’s enemies.

So why did he choose to play the role of a Japanese enthusiast when just an engineer would have been enough? To keep in his home a place that no Japanese would inspect, no, they wouldn’t do so much as to touch it, not even the military police would dare to consider it a possible hideout, even if this place is in plain view, even if they would go so far as to bow at it. No one would search something behind the imperial portrait, no one would do so much as to touch it.

Sakuma now has his answer and sheathes his sword.

There’s something really beautiful here. Gordon is confused by this and complains. The camera is high over Sakuma, this helpless man who was about to commit suicide… only Sakuma is putting away his sword because Sakuma… yeah, he’s going to take charge now! Go, Sakuma, go!

Close up of Sakuma’s lips as his words are going to change the turn of the story.

Sakuma speaks in English and tells where the cipher is. He could have spared himself this as both Miyoshi and Gordon understand Japanese and so he could have said it in Japanese but, I think, it’s a jab to both of them. To Miyoshi, who bragged Military Police can’t understand English with the subtle implication they’re dumb and ignorant guys and to Gordon, who also felt so much smarter than them and used their faith at his advantage. Sorry guys, Sakuma can speak English as well and even figure out things. I’m so proud of him I’ll hug him if I could.

Note another very cool visual effect. The camera first gives us a close up of Gordon… then moves backward so as to include Sakuma who’s in front of Gordon as well… but visually we can see it as Sakuma surpassing Gordon and leaving him behind. Gordon is totally shocked here.

(On a personal note while I’m typing all this I’m so hyper for how Sakuma was awesome that my dog is giving me odd glances… ^_^;;;)

‘Yakudō’ [躍動 Dynamic] begins to play.

And now that we’ve seen Gordon’s reaction, let’s see Miyoshi’s. In fact, after the close up of Gordon that ended up showing us how Sakuma metaphorically left him behind and surpassed him, we’ve a close up of Miyoshi. At first we see that he’s not smiling and with his eyes hidden by his visor… same as we left him prior to Sakuma figuring things up.

Then Miyoshi raises his head, his eyes become visible (which is normally a visual clue he’s showing his true feelings) and he smiles.

Miyoshi is pleased Sakuma managed to figure things out on his own and… gracefully accepts his ‘loss’. Sakuma has proved himself and Miyoshi is the one who says ‘yes sir’ and runs to obey his orders, touching the imperial portrait to get the cipher.

Real close up of Gordon, so close up that the frame can contain only half of his shocked face.

He’s trying to process what’s happening and, while he’s doing so, Sakuma helps US to process what’s happening by explaining in an inner monologue how he figured things out. Basically the visual is again using a very smart trick. The anime knows not everyone might have figured things out, so it’s as if it’s saying to us, if you’re as surprised as Gordon by this sudden development… well, listen to Sakuma’s inner monologue as he explains to you how he figured out things. Well, it’s sort of creepy to be compared to Gordon… but it’s visually very smart.

Also interesting is how they had Miyoshi running toward the portrait… (while another fitting BGM plays, ‘Ka-kyoku’ [佳局 Good Arrangement]) but we actually see his back and he’s like running in slow motion.

As Miyoshi grows closer and closer to the imperial portrait, Gordon finally finds in himself the ability to move from his frozen position. First he screams him to stop, sweating and eyes so wide you can see the capillaries in them.

Then we see Miyoshi had reached the portrait. The visor hides his face. He’s just a nameless, faceless person/threat for Gordon, someone who’s SLOWLY reaching for the imperial portrait. Gordon screams again to stop, it’s just his mouth we see and then his arm stretching helplessly toward Miyoshi… but he’s too slow, too far. Over his outstretches hand, in overlay, we see Miyoshi stretching his hands as well, about to reach the imperial portrait.

It’s sort of awesome as the scene well deliver how the situation should have felt for Gordon. The slow motion of course works well to let Sakuma do the exposition but, in many cases, it’s also how a person in a situation similar to Gordon, perceives the pace at which things are moving. Everything seems in slow motion.

The scene ends here. We won’t see Miyoshi touching the portrait and through all his monologue Sakuma hadn’t mentioned it in Japanese once. In a way, even the anime is shy of showing us someone really touching the portrait and just hints at how the touching will be inevitably done.

The new scene starts by showing us the street in which D Agency is. We can see that the sun is slowly setting. Beautiful sunset, by the way, I love the lights and how they’ve placed the sun behind a building in this scene. And, symbolically, D Agency, the place where spies are, is in the shadows. Cool.

No musical background is used here and, for a while, it will continue not being used.

Now we don’t know in which day exactly we are but we know it’s spring. Let’s assume it’s April. In April the sun sets in Tokyo at around the 18:00… or 6:00 PM. As the sun isn’t set completely and it won’t be for a while we can assume it’s earlier than 6:00 PM. Let’s say… 5:00 PM? The boys went to investigate Gordon’s house at 8:00 AM. They supposedly spent there half a hour or a little more (Miyoshi said they would find the cipher in half a hour but I guess arresting Gordon might have taken some time). So… this means that loosely 8 hours went from when the boys arrested Gordon to when Sakuma reported to Yūki?

Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe we’re just at the end of a long day in which many things happened and this meeting between Sakuma and Yūki is just concluding Sakuma’s day at D Agency.

After all we’ll later discover that Gordon was carried to D Agency and interrogated there and that Yūki and Sakuma discussed what to do with him (and, probably, with the ciphers). After all, when Sakuma reported to Mutō the day after, it’s probably morning… but during that report he’ll tell us all that Yūki plans to do with Gordon… and that we didn’t see being discussed previously. So well, likely we just had a huge time skip during which many things happened but we weren’t meant to know them yet.

Anyway, back to the scene, Yūki is standing, his back to Sakuma, looking outside the window. The camera it’s at his same level as we hear Sakuma saying he has a question.

In the next shoot we see that Sakuma is behind him. His figure as he asks Yūki if he knew the Military Police had already inspected Gordon’s house, is small compared to Yūki’s and almost completely covered by him. Although the camera isn’t below Sakuma but on an even level with him (and Yūki), it’s clear that Yūki is the dominating figure here. He’s the one in control, the one who knows. Sakuma is right behind him but he’s BEHIND him. He’s figuring things out but well, the masterplan is Yūki’s. No matter how cool our Sakuma was before, he simply can’t compete with this man.

Yūki shifts his position slightly as he answers. He doesn’t turn to Sakuma and he answers Sakuma’s question with a question ‘what makes you think that?’. Generally a shift in the position visually (and well, psychologically) implies nervousness, discomfort.

Yūki probably doesn’t know what Sakuma is thinking right now. Sakuma can turn against him, as Yūki likely knows Miyoshi had put Sakuma in an unpleasant position and Yūki has allowed it, instead than stopping Miyoshi and explaining things to Sakuma. Sakuma can held him responsible. He can attack him… and use the incident against D Agency. Sakuma doesn’t have to accept Yūki’s plan about what to do with Gordon and the cipher.

Even though Yūki outranks Sakuma, in his role as liaison Sakuma evidently has some sort of authority which is why, when he’ll explain things to Mutō, it’ll be from an ‘I allowed it to happen’ position instead than an ‘I was forced to obey to the Lieutenant Colonel’ position.

LOL, I’ll be interested in finding exactly how the power relationship between Sakuma and Yūki works but it’s a bit too hard to find info about this sort of things in Japan in this time period.

Anyway, Sakuma can make things more troublesome for Yūki if he decides to be uncooperative. I’m willing to bet Yūki would still be capable to handle them just fine but they won’t be as easy as they could be if Sakuma decides to be cooperative.

So let’s go back to the story.

Sakuma… doesn’t attack Yūki. As Sakuma explains his reasoning… two trams coming from opposite direction, cross the street at the same time. It’s probably symbolic of how, although Yūki is a spy and Sakuma is a soldier, they sort of reached a ‘common ground’, an ‘understanding’ of some sort. Even if their beliefs go in opposite directions, for a moment they came into contact.

Sakuma explains why he came up with that idea and what he thought Yūki wanted to obtain, which was for Gordon to keep his guard lowered against this second inspection.

A side note here. It seems that the subs did a mess with this bit as they seem to imply Yūki wanted to avoid troubles for the Military Police in a future THIRD inspection… while other sources says that what Yūki wanted was for his fake Military Police unit to have less troubles. The second interpretation actually makes more sense as they’re the one who expose and arrest Gordon in the end and turn into a double spy (so there would be no need for a THIRD Military Police inspection) so I’ll go with this interpretation.

So, as we were saying, Sakuma doesn’t accuse Yūki. He thinks Yūki had at heart the positive result of the mission. He doesn’t blame him for not informing him about the whole thing (that was Mutō’s duty, not Yūki’s) and hey, Sakuma is even right in his thinking.

We won’t heat Yūki confirming it, actually Yūki will say nothing in the anime, but we’ll see Yūki’s mouth reflected on the window and we’ll see the corners of his lips turning up in a smile. Yūki is clearly pleased with this development. I think that he’s probably thinking he and Sakuma are finally starting to get along in the right way. It took them a year to get at this point… talk about being slow…

Anyway the idea of seeing the reflection of Yūki’s smile instead than the smile itself is interesting. Yūki is a spy and he’s also used to present a deceptive image of himself. It’s as if to say that the reflection is showing us his true feelings, the feelings nor Sakuma or anyone else was meant to see (Yūki is still giving his back to Sakuma… and to us… so we can’t see he’s smiling, yet his reflection reveals it).

In ‘D no Maō’ when Sakuma did the same question Yūki only praised him for figuring out things with his own brain, which, I guess, implies that yes, Sakuma guessed right. In the novel Sakuma makes no questions, we just read his inner monologue in which he explains how he reasoned out that Yūki should have known about the search beforehand. Anyway our dear boy Sakuma had guessed everything correctly. Yūki knew about how the search happened.

The discussion probably went on… or not… we don’t really know. The scene ends here.

The next scene remains without musical background and starts with Sakuma leaving Yūki’s office and closing the door behind himself. As Sakuma turns to walk away he sees Miyoshi leaning against a wall. Miyoshi turns and smiles at him. Through the whole scene… the camera will remain even. There’s no more one who’s below and one who’s over. They’re equal.

And it’s sort of to deliver this point that we see that in the next frame the camera is showing them both to us. They’re still… distant one from the other and the scene slightly moves from Miyoshi to Sakuma. They haven’t reached an understanding yet. Miyoshi’s words as he asks Sakuma if he’s going to the General Staff Headquarters and comments how the Colonel will be shocked as well as his laugh, feel like a remark to Sakuma. Our boy is unhappy with himself and we can see that, as he sees Miyoshi laughing, Sakuma lowers his head and asks him if he’s there to make fun of him. He’s sort of depressed and his gaze is downcast.

Sakuma has awesomely handled a damn complicate situation but he has figured out that, as Miyoshi has implied in the previous episode, his faith had made him blind to something important (and also likely that Miyoshi had put him in that situation for his own amusement) and he probably is pretty sure that Miyoshi understood things way before he did… so Sakuma feels the other has a right to mock him. He doesn’t feel equal to Miyoshi.

And, more important, he can’t understand that Miyoshi isn’t there to mock him.

Miyoshi, in fact, is honestly surprised by Sakuma’s words.

I think his previous words were supposed to mean that the Colonel should be shocked that Sakuma could succeed where Mutō had failed. I don’t think he wanted to put Sakuma and Mutō on the same boat. I think Miyoshi appreciated how Sakuma was going to stay honest to his principles and therefore was willing to commit Harakiri where Sakuma’s superior officer instead was only worried to push the blame for his mistake on someone else.

And here I think that we have Miyoshi in his most honest moment in these two episodes.

He admits that his intention now wasn’t to make fun of Sakuma, that he has changed his opinion about Sakuma (which implies his previous opinion about him wasn’t right hence for once Miyoshi admits he was wrong, someone please take notes of this) and that he hadn’t expected Sakuma to figure out things. Basically Sakuma has surpassed his expectations on him. We saw in the previous episode that Miyoshi has a low opinion of people in the Army… yet Sakuma managed to handle what Miyoshi thought he wouldn’t know how to handle. Miyoshi doesn’t look at Sakuma as he says so. His gaze his lowered and sort of introspective. Embarrassed? Who knows.

Still, I think that this also implies Miyoshi didn’t plan to let Sakuma commit Harakiri. We know that’s not the D Agency’s style and, since Miyoshi didn’t expect Sakuma to figure things out and he was in charge of things… well, it was his duty to pull Sakuma out of that predicament. How, we’ll never know. But well, let’s take this as some sort of peace offering from Miyoshi and a Miyoshi-style attempt at bonding and make friends.

Sakuma though, still isn’t looking at him. Miyoshi is sort of praising him but Sakuma doesn’t cheer up at that.

Miyoshi stands (he was leaning against a wall… which can look as him being relaxed but it’s psychologically also a good way to ‘watch your own back’ while you’re admitting a moment of weakness, which combines with the fact he’s keeping his hands in his pockets quite nicely as this can also be used as another visual clue to tell us Miyoshi wasn’t as comfortable with the situation as he tried to look…) and waves the whole thing away by claiming that there are more important matters. Like them going out in the town. Would Sakuma join them?

Note the difference between this scene and the previous time Miyoshi had invited Sakuma.

That time it was purely by accident. When they were leaving, Miyoshi had caught sign of him watching them and had invited him. Now Miyoshi had deliberately seek him out to invite him to go with them. Actually he HAD EVEN WAITED FOR SAKUMA TO FINISH TALKING WITH YŪKI.

Also Miyoshi is smiling to Sakuma, when, previously, he wasn’t.

In short for a narcissist who looks down on everyone… well, all this is a BIG step.

Of course his invitation will work as a hint later on… so it might be all Miyoshi wanted was to give Sakuma a hint… but I think the invitation is honest as well. Fundamentally he’s telling him ‘Don’t go to the General Staff Headquarters, come have fun with us.’ Note also how even though they’re still at the same distance, the visual presents then as close, basically Sakuma overlapping part of Miyoshi’s arm. There’s a point of contact between them now. And the anime is going to try to remark it even more.

Sakuma begins asking ‘back there, why…’. He won’t end the sentence as he’ll figure out the answer by himself. We know which was meant to be the question from ‘D no Maō’. Basically Sakuma wanted to know why Miyoshi had said he only will need 30 minutes to inspect Gordon’s house, if this is supposed to mean he also has figured out that the military police had already inspected the place (and, possibly, if he had figured out that Mutō wanted to screw Sakuma’s life). We see that Miyoshi’s expression is surprised at his unfinished question. LOL, Sakuma is way more surprising than you thought, isn’t he, Miyoshi?

Anyway, remember when I said that Sakuma wasn’t looking at him? That was likely what was in his mind that pushed him not to meet Miyoshi’s gaze. How Miyoshi might have figured out things basically right from that moment. And, likely, if Miyoshi had figured out things, how far he had figured out and why he has involved Sakuma?

But then Sakuma decides to drop the question. In the same way as he hadn’t blamed Yūki for not telling him things he won’t blame Miyoshi as well. In a way he’s sort of accepting the way they do things even if he still turns Miyoshi’s invitation down.

And we go back to compare this scene with the previous in which Miyoshi had invited Sakuma to go with them.

In both scenes Sakuma turns his invitation down… but now he’s smiling and he says ‘maybe next time’. While the previous time the message was, ‘no way I’ll associate with you lot’, this time it’s more ‘this time I can’t but I’m not adverse to the idea’. In a way he too has sort of symbolically made a step toward Miyoshi… even though the visual shows them divided now. And they seem distant even if they still hadn’t moved. Sakuma is turning down Miyoshi out of duty. He likely really planned to go doing his report to the General Staff Headquarters (we’ll see later he’ll change his mind as he’ll start walking in an opposite direction). He’s still a soldier, he’s not like the spies that can go out all the nights to have fun. They’re closer yet still distant.

Sakuma leaves, Miyoshi moves out of his way so as to let him pass and then he is left behind. We can see this as Sakuma taking control of his life now. The scene started with Miyoshi closer to the camera and Sakuma farther, so Miyoshi looked ‘bigger’ and Sakuma smaller, but, when Sakuma leaves, he’s the one who ends up closer to the camera. He’s not following Miyoshi anymore, nor Miyoshi is an obstacle to his path. Sakuma is leading his own path.

By the way, as in the previous scene Sakuma started to leave we finally get a musical background that will continue in this scene. It’s ‘Kaigi’ [懐疑 Skepticism].

This musical background was played the past episode also, when Sakuma was trying to understand the boys and explaining why he felt so distant from them. Now he’s played while he’s trying to understand how things should have gone. We might say that this is the ‘Sakuma trying to understand things’ musical background.

The next scene opens outside of D Agency. The camera moves down from the building to Sakuma, who’s still in front of it and places itself below Sakuma. In the next shot it is above Sakuma but Sakuma… is sort of looking it ‘straight in the eyes’. It’s sort of a challenging scene. Sakuma is ‘small’ compared to the D Agency building, a symbolism to hint at how Sakuma has understood everyone in the building figured things out before him. He still wants some answers thoughts… but he’s planning to figure things out by himself. He’s not going to ask Yūki or Miyoshi. Even though Sakuma feels inferior to them… he’s not just accepting this passively.

We hear Sakuma admitting to himself he has no proof Mutō commanded the Military Police when they searched through Gordon’s house… still he starts reconstructing how he thinks things could have gone if he did.

Sakuma starts walking, taking the street at the left of D Agency.

As he walks he mentally he pictures how the inspection should have gone, with the Military Police that, instead of inspecting the Imperial Portrait, bows to it, and Mutō that’s shaken by how they found nothing. Sakuma’s thoughts explain us that if Mutō’s failure were to go public it would tarnish his record and stop him from being promoted. We can’t know why he’s so afraid his failure were to go public but, in truth, what Sakuma doesn’t tell us and that, in the novel, totally freaked out Mutō, is how Gordon claimed he would present an official complain. THIS would have caused Mutō’s failure to become known and THIS is what caused him to freak out.

In Sakuma’s reconstruction though, Mutō remained waiting in the car while in ‘D no Maō’ Mutō, at least, went to face Gordon. *sigh* I don’t know which Mutō is worse between the two… though, if we go according to the novel, Mutō didn’t wait on the car… so maybe this is just Sakuma thinking that, after the raid failed, Mutō might have spent some time sulking in the car?

A break to talk about the visual. It’s awesome how the anime delivers Mutō’s feelings not by having him talk but just by showing us how he bit his thumb.

Anyway, at night, Mutō is back in his office drinking a raw egg when it dawns on him he could push the blame on D Agency by having them fail at the same task.

The fact he’s drinking a raw egg is a hint he already got hungover. Remember the focus that the past episode put on how Mutō was drinking a raw egg when he handed out the mission to Sakuma? The raw egg comes back in this scene as well. Sakuma doesn’t know yet the importance of the raw egg (and therefore of the hungover) but I like to think his subconscious has already done the connection since he’s mentally depicting the scene taking into consideration that Mutō would drink a raw egg. There’s a lot of focus in this scene too on the egg. I like to think that’s Sakuma’s subconscious that’s trying to tell Sakuma something.

Of course, it’s also the ‘Joker Game’ authors who’re trying to tell to us, the viewers, something… which makes it double interesting. Like Sakuma, we’re given a chance to guess what Mutō did after the raid and prior to having the idea to put the blame on D Agency.

A mention on the visual.

When Mutō comes up with his plan… we actually don’t see him but his widening eye reflected on the egg. Symbolically it’s him and yet it’s not. It’s ‘someone else’, and on someone else he decides he could shift the blame.

Then there’s a picture of the Gordon’s file, this huge threat on Mutō’s career…

…and then we see that there’s a picture of Mutō. The Gordon’s file is in front of him and seems huge because it’s closer to the camera… but the camera is below both and moves up to focus on Mutō’s face… which is in the dark. A clear hint that his idea is malicious.

Sakuma’s reconstruction ends here. We’re back on seeing him walking through Tokyo’s streets as he wonders on how Yūki could have figured Mutō had already inspected the place. Sakuma logically assumes Mutō would have kept his failure a secret. Sakuma was likely given the order to inspect Gordon’s place the day after the first inspection took place. This meant Yūki only had a short time to discover about it.

And here the egg shows us its importance. Sakuma remembers that, when Mutō gave him the order to inspect Gordon’s house he was drinking a raw egg. This means Mutō was actually hungover as, in that time period, this was supposed to be a ‘cure’ to deal with it.

If we’re not familiar with pre WW2 Tokyo we can’t know, but the visual shows us that Sakuma is really going to the General Staff offices. As he walks we can see behind him we can see Tokyo Station…

…then he walks next to the moat that circles the Imperial Place…

…then as he walks in front what is the Meiji Seimei Kan Building he’s stuck by a realization and freezes.

The Meiji Seimei Kan isn’t that far from where the General Staff Headquarters were, proof that Sakuma turned Miyoshi’s invitation down because he really planned to report what had happened to Mutō.

Also… the irony of Sakuma having his moment of revelation in front of that building is delicious as western viewers might not known but that place was, at the time, the headquarters of the Meiji Yasuda Life insurance Company.

Anyway what’s dawning on Sakuma is the memory of Miyoshi telling him if he’d like to splurge and go to a classy restaurant (旅亭 “Ryotei”). Here Sakuma does the connection. Mutō was hungover because he got drunk in one of the inns he likes to visit.

Now… the anime is less clear on this than the novel but even in the anime we can figure out that Sakuma went in said inns with Mutō and therefore likely knows of his drunken habits… and, among them, there’s probably to tattle about what he should keep for himself with the geisha that work there. Knowing this he can figure out where Yūki might have learnt about what had happened.

But maybe I’m going too ahead of time. Viewers will discover all this in a while. For now we only see that Sakuma abruptly changes his track as he evidently decides that evening he won’t go to report to the General Staff Headquarters.

Oh, as Sakuma changes his track ‘Senzai’ [潜在 Potential] starts and will be our musical background in the following scene as well.

We’ve already heard ‘Senzai’ too in the past episode. It was when Yūki was explaining Sakuma things after the Joker Game. Sakuma wasn’t really understanding much back then but now things come to full circle. Now he’s going to be the one who understood everything and who’s leading the game. Sort of, as he’s just a First Lieutenant but still, he’ll do the best he could.

The new scene starts with… the General Staff Headquarters.

We don’t know which time it is but it’s clear is no more evening and it’s not night. I’ll say it’s morning.

Next we’ve a close-up of Mutō’s utterly surprised face as he says ‘you… found proof?’

It’s a smart idea as it cuts the unnecessary scenes of having Sakuma summarizing everything we already knew to him again and jumps right on the juicy bit, that jackass Mutō’s surprised face. And he’s really a jackass because the next he says is ‘impossible… there’s no way…’

In short Mutō was sure Sakuma and the D Agency would end up failing and yet he sent them on chasing a proof he didn’t even believe existed anyway. It was bad enough to think that he might have done it thinking that the boys might still have a small chance, and that if, only if they were to fail, they would blame… but, in this way, we know he set them up for what he believed was a secure failure. And even if we knew he despised them (well, the anime didn’t make it as crystalline clear as the novel but one could get it anyway), the worst part is that he evidently was willing to let Sakuma too take the fall, Sakuma whom he knew and was loyal to him. The jerk.

Through, truth to be told, the anime didn’t remark well how badly he intended to let Sakuma take the fall. Basically the novel explains that Mutō’s plan was also to deny he ordered the inspection. This would mean that Sakuma would have to take the blame for ordering it, while D Agency will take the blame for failing it. Remember when we talked of how the incident might have ruined Mutō’s career? Well, to protect his own career he planned to ruin Sakuma’s. The bastard. For Sakuma things could actually be even harder as he’s just a First Lieutenant so they’ll probably be even harsher with him. Someone please splat Mutō on the ground with a giant hammer.

Anyway Sakuma catches his chance to point out, while Mutō is basically admitting there was no way they could do it, that he hadn’t been told it was the second time. We don’t see Sakuma as he says so, we see Mutō gasps and this tells us he realizes he betrayed himself. And here we see Sakuma saying to him what he didn’t say to Yūki (or Miyoshi). Sakuma didn’t blame Yūki (or Miyoshi) for not warning him it was the second time the place got inspected. He’s blaming Mutō.

Mutō keeps on being a jerk. He demands Sakuma to repeat what he says, acting as if he hadn’t understood… or daring Sakuma to repeat his accusation. Do your pick. The camera is high over him. It’s high over Sakuma too… but it seems to lower as it moves behind Sakuma and Sakuma looks like he’s towering over Mutō. Sakuma might be a mere First Lieutenant but surely he’s way better than this jerk. Then Sakuma clarifies himself and the camera is below him.

Mutō defends his actions. Sakuma is just a Liaison, he had no duty to inform him. The camera though… is below them both. They’re on an even level. Mutō can brag he’s over Sakuma as he’s higher in ranking… but the camera doesn’t humble Sakuma here. Actually, when Mutō tells him to keep his ego in check, the camera is below Sakuma, whose expression remain stoic and calm. He’s not even sweating while Mutō is.

The camera is HIGH above Mutō as he tries to wash the whole thing away claiming ‘it doesn’t matter’ and demands to know where the evidence was.

Let’s face it, the camera is subtly telling us who’s the jerk and who’s the good boy. Anyway Sakuma comes closer and whispers in his ear it was behind the Imperial Portrait.

A sidenote here. In the novel and in the ‘D no Maō’ manga Sakuma didn’t whisper this in Mutō’s ear. I guess here they have him do it to remark how this was such a sacred place they couldn’t even openly talk about it or what it ended up hiding.

Anyway we don’t really see Sakuma’s expression here, as he talks, just his mouth. The focus is all on Mutō’s shocked face. Sakuma, after all, is just delivering an information. His expression is not relevant as he has to keep it neutral.

The interaction between Sakuma and Mutō pays quite a bit of attention at keeping Sakuma expressionless and focusing more on Mutō and all the expressions he does. Skipping the fact that it sort of feel good to see Mutō being constantly shocked (and it’s also proof that Sakuma is kept expressionless on purpose and not due to the anime’s inability to give expression to its characters) and that it’s fitting for Sakuma’s role to keep a neutral expression, this will work well to underline the one single moment in which Sakuma’s expression will shift. But I’m going ahead of time again.

Anyway, as I’ve said in another post, once Mutō learns where the evidence was, his main worry is that Sakuma might have touched the Imperial Portrait and his relief when Sakuma confirms he didn’t touch it is evident. To us westerns it feels weird but, back then, in Japan it was really a HUGE taboo. Let’s remember again how the novel and the ‘D no Maō’ manga inform us that who touched the Imperial Portrait ended up being forced to commit suicide (from here the irony of Sakuma who was about to commit suicide because it didn’t dawn on him to touch the Imperial Portrait…).

Anyway Mutō recovers and wants the microfilm… to be shocked again when Sakuma tells him they didn’t retrieve it. The camera is again high over Mutō as Sakuma announces they only confirmed its existence, subtly preparing us for how Mutō is going to completely lose control over the situation.

Mutō complains then thinks that maybe Sakuma didn’t bring back the microfilm because it didn’t contain the photo of the cipher… and well, I don’t like Mutō but I’ve to praise ‘Joker Game’ for the care they put in his expression. It’s not just his dubber that makes a good work. The expression on his face keeps on changing. They don’t recycle surprised footage after surprised footage. They redraw him with a different expression each time. They count on Mutō’s expressions to give us the atmosphere of each scene. While Sakuma remains stony and expressionless, the whole dynamic of the situation is handled by Mutō. He’s really the star of this scene in which he ends up on being destroyed.

And the scene in which Sakuma tells him that no, the microfilm contained photos of the cipher and we see Mutō first surprised and then losing it… well, that one is awesome. Kudos to Sakuma for remaining calm and with a neutral expression because I think it was really hard. Mutō’s furious as he yells at him, he pants and we see the blood vessels in his eyes.

Sakuma explains his reasons calmly… and then the camera goes again below him. Guess who’s in control here? Guess who? Guess who?

Mutō would like to counter but Sakuma’s argument is solid and countering would make him look like an idiot. So he tries taking back control by demanding to know what they did with Gordon. We can see he’s still angry, a vein popping out on his temple and as he speaks he tends to clench his teeth. He’s even sort of raised, not quite up but not sitting anymore. It’s like he’s searching for reasons to attack Sakuma. And the camera… now shows how tiny he is compared to Sakuma. It’s below both, but is’ so close to Sakuma that basically the upper half of him is out of our view and Sakuma seems a giant… while Mutō is all included in the scene and seems so small compared to Sakuma…

And now Sakuma explains Mutō what YŪKI, Mutō’s archenemy, plans to do with Gordon. Basically Sakuma tells him is going to let Yūki do as he prefer with the man and also take all the glory from the operation, the glory Mutō wanted for himself.

Predictably Mutō loses it and starts having a temper tantrum but… we don’t see it. The camera is on Sakuma, who remains calm and expressionless while we hear Mutō yelling and raging and likely tossing or smacking objects around. We even see Mutō’s tea cup flying through the room and past Sakuma to hear it smashing either against a wall or on the floor.

It’s smart because picturing it in our mind allows the viewers to see it the way they prefer… as well as to see how Sakuma can remain calm through all this. While Mutō has completely lost it… it’s Sakuma the one who’s in control. And, from how Mutō implied that Sakuma actually could have decided how to handle the whole matter with Gordon, we get that Sakuma likely had some form of power over Yūki’s actions. Even if he was below Yūki he could have imposed how to handle the cipher or Gordon and allow Mutō to get all the glory from that mission. And he didn’t.

It’s particularly hypocritical of Mutō to claim Yūki shouldn’t act the way he does because people aren’t toys… when he just toyed with Sakuma’s life as he pleased. Mutō is an horrible person.

The next shoots show the cup now broken on the ground and Mutō’s desk, now a mess as the objects on it were overturned. We can hear Mutō is panting hard but his head is out of the shoot. We can keep on depicting his angry face in our mind as we prefer… although evidently he has calmed down.

Then we hear Sakuma telling him he has something of his. At this Mutō raises his head and his surprised face is again in the frame. Sakuma hands him a cigarette case that Mutō recognizes as his own and asks Sakuma where did he find it. Sakuma replies it was found in Hanabishi. Mutō raises his gaze on him, shocked and, likely, understands what Sakuma also knows and what us viewers will be told in a minute.

The camera moves close to Sakuma… and then a flashback starts.

It’s night and we’re out of a inn, an inn named Hanabishi.

An old man working for the place and a Geisha (according to the credits she is also the owner of Hanabishi) greet the person that has just entered. That person turns out to be Sakuma, who’s slightly embarrassed to show he now doesn’t have a military haircut anymore. LOL, Sakuma is sort of cute here.

Anyway it’s clear that Sakuma and the Geisha know each other as she recognized him.

What the anime doesn’t tell us but only left to our intuition is that Hanabishi is a luxury places that serves higher ups in the Army so no, Sakuma didn’t habitually visited it on his own, he came here to accompany Mutō, who’s a habitual client.

As soon as he’s recognized Sakuma claims he’s there for an investigation and pulls out a Military Police notebook… which works the same as a badge in Japan.

As I’ve said in other posts I’ve no idea if that notebook is Sakuma’s or if he just took it from his disguise as Military Policeman. The novel labels Sakuma as an Army First Lieutenant and not as a Military Police First Lieutenant (yes, although the Military Police is part of the Army they actually differentiated if one was a First Lieutenant in the Army or in the Military Police) and the anime labels him as Colonel Mutō’s attendant and Mutō is in the Infantry not in the Military Police (the M insignia on his uniform is red, the colour of the infantry and not black, the colour of the Military Police) which should hint at how Sakuma too should have been in the infantry. Oh well, let’s go on.

No, wait, let’s stop a moment here or better, let’s go back to when Sakuma realized that Yūki might have discovered that Mutō already went to Gordon’s house when he reminded Miyoshi speaking of Ryotei.

Back then the sun hadn’t set yet. When Sakuma had his realization there was still plenty of light. However, when Sakuma reaches Hanabishi is pitch black. What the anime also doesn’t tell us but wants us to realize is that Sakuma, poor guy, didn’t went straight to Hanabishi but had to visit more than one inn to find the one in which Mutō went that night. The guy really did a throughout search… and even broke his self set curfew to find out where Mutō went and if he could discover something there. Sakuma is a diligent boy who once sets on something does his best to see it through.

Next scene has the Geisha admitting Mutō had been their guest as Sakuma suspected. Sakuma is clearly handled as an honourable guest, given a pillow to sit over, tea and sweets (not that Sakuma is looking at all that had been offered to him… from how things look he won’t even touch them).

In a commentary from Miwa Shiro he said that Sakuma speaks and acts very politely to the Geisha, which not only contrast to how Sakuma usually speaks, but also to his role here (he’s a soldier in an investigation mission so he doesn’t have to be that respectful). So, it’s sort of as if he’s humble with her, as if she could make fun of him due to the bad habit of the Colonel of getting drunk. The visual too always places them on an even level and the geisha seems to talk to Sakuma with confidence and even laughs at his suspicions. She’s clearly not afraid even if he’s there for an investigation.

Anyway Sakuma learns that yes, Mutō went there, that he was in a terrible mood and drank until late in the night. This confirms Sakuma’s suspicion that, after the failed investigation, Mutō got himself drunk. What Sakuma wants to know now is if it was possible Yūki was there as well, so he asks if there were other customers and, once he gets an affirmative reply, he asks for a description of the man that was there. He’s told he was the president of a small company who visit the place often, sociable and that causes the geisha to laugh, capable to drink too much and fall asleep in the room next to Mutō isn’t something that calls to Sakuma’s mind Yūki but, just to be sure he asks if he has a white glover and walks with a cane. Meanwhile we see a flashback of the scene from Ep 1 in which we were introduced to Yūki… or better to his fake distinctive traits. Remember what I said about how the first thing Yūki did was to trick us with them? Well, here it comes to use why he did so.

The audience, like Sakuma, knows about them and remembers them well and identifies Yūki through them. Like Sakuma we’re all disappointed when the Geisha tells us that, no, that customer had nothing of the sort. Sakuma is about to leave, clearly thinking he won’t find out anything else. The only place in which Mutō could have tattled out about the inspection was the inn at which he got drunk, but if Yūki wasn’t here… well, he couldn’t really guess how the man could find out about the second inspection.

It’s as Sakuma moves to leave that the Geisha talks to Sakuma about Mutō’s cigarette case and how it was returned by the mysterious guest that, supposedly, isn’t Yūki and asks him to return it to Mutō.

As we see the cigarette case, it’s worth to note that ‘Kanshi’ [監視 Monitoring] starts being played… a hint that actually someone was monitoring Mutō’s actions and that guest’s presence wasn’t that casual. The musical background will continue in the following scene, as if the one monitoring Mutō was Sakuma. Well, in a way he was.

And now back we go to Mutō’s office. Sakuma is again whispering in Mutō’s ear, telling him that ‘it’s against military law to tell anyone about the details of a military police raid on a suspected enemy spy’s home, even a geisha whom you (Mutō) visit regularly’.

We again aren’t shown Sakuma’s expression, just Mutō’s shocked one. In itself, having Sakuma whisper this in Mutō’s ear feels a bit silly as he did it in the novel and in the ‘D no Maō’ manga as well but in both of them there were people in Mutō’s office while here they’re alone. But well, I guess they wanted to give to this scene the same sense of secrecy they tried to give to the scene in which Sakuma talked about how the cipher was hidden behind the Imperial Portrait.

Basically Mutō broke the military law, leaking confidential intelligence information. This is possibly a blunder even worse than investigating Gordon’s house and finding nothing as that one was a mistake but this one is a crime.

And now Sakuma goes and states that ‘the Lieutenant Colonel Yūki’ said ‘this’ matter will not be made public… only there’s a problem here. Sakuma hasn’t talked about what he has discovered at Hanabishi with Yūki yet. And Yūki didn’t tell him what he discovered at Hanabishi. In short, Sakuma has not betrayed Mutō by telling what he discovered to Yūki, nor Yūki shared with him what he knew.

Now… I don’t want to say Sakuma outright lied. It can totally be that when he was with Yūki, Yūki told him he won’t make public how he knew, without giving him any other detail. Or it can be that with ‘this’ Sakuma isn’t quite meaning ‘how you slipped state secrets to a geisha’ but ‘how this is the second investigation and you made a blunder with the first’. After all Sakuma said so in the novel and in the ‘D no Maō’ manga but, differently from how he whispered in Mutō’s ear the little matter about state secrets, this part was said out loud.

Though, well, even if it’s not a lie, I think Sakuma is saying so knowing Mutō will misunderstand and think that Sakuma has actually been the one who sold him to Yūki… and that he could even blackmail him. Sakuma wanted Mutō to feel betrayed the way he felt betrayed. Mutō wanted to use Sakuma as if he were a toy, a pawn. He never expected much from Sakuma, not that he could find evidence or that he could turn against him. Sakuma was below his attention he didn’t own him loyalty or explanations or even apologies for setting him up. I think… Sakuma has waited so long before telling him about the cigarette case because he hoped the Colonel would do something… decent.

Giving him a decent explanation on why he hadn’t warned him for example. Instead the man not only silenced him claiming he had no right to know and that he was being arrogant for demanding to know but had complained that Yūki used people as if they were toys… when he did exactly the same. I think at that point Sakuma was fed up.

As Sakuma likely expected Mutō accused him of having switched on Yūki’s side, feeling utterly betrayed by the one who once was his attendant. And here we can see this is exactly what Sakuma wanted as Sakuma for the first time stop looking emotionless and smiles.

It lasts a second (and Anime Sakuma is the only one of the three Sakuma who allows himself a smile as all the others had to keep a neutral expression)…

…and then… Sakuma tosses Mutō’s words back at him. Mutō told him he was just a simple liaison so Sakuma remarks that’s exactly how he acted… as per orders he was given. Which is likely absolutely true. He didn’t betray Mutō but it should have felt so good to let him think so. Foolish also but good.

Novel and anime agree that at this point Mutō dismissed Sakuma in a low tone and, as Sakuma didn’t understood it immediately, he basically yelled at him to get out.

In the ‘D no Maō’ manga Mutō instead declares he’ll sent Sakuma to the frontlines.

Now… while I prefer for Sakuma not to be sent on the frontlines… well, Sakuma disappears from the story so it would have made more sense if this had to be the reason instead than him simply vanishing and not being present in stories like EP 12, which is chronologically placed short after the ‘Joker Game’ episode or the one in the OAV, which has all the spies present, meaning it’s placed BEFORE EP 12.

Okay, to be honest I would have preferred if they had kept Sakuma around for the OAV and Ep 12, especially considering that since his dubber worked in the OAV it wasn’t a problem of Seki Tomokazu not wanting to voice Sakuma anymore… and I think it’ll do good for D Agency to have a Liaison... because while it’s true that Sakuma doesn’t show up in the novels anymore, it’s also true the same could be said for the others. In the novel it’s said nowhere that the guys that show up in ‘XX Double Cross’ are the same spies that showed up in ‘Joker Game’… so allowing the same Liaison to be still around in ‘XX Double Cross’ would have made no harm…

All right, all right, I quit.

Sakuma excuses himself and leaves but it’s clear that, although he still is below Mutō in rank, here he was the one who was in control.

After Sakuma leaves the next scene is seen from outside Mutō’s window. Fundamentally we see him losing it again… though it’s interesting how we see him losing it again from a place outside his study. As if to imply we’re taking distance from it.

A tram (the number 5018 if you want to know) passes abruptly in front of the screen. Actually the scene was switched but it was done so suddenly we could have the impression it passed in front of Mutō’s window. It’s actually a hint that everything is coming to full circle. You might remember how something like that also happened early on, at the beginning of Ep 1. Only, back then, when the tram left the screen we were showed the Great East Asia Cultural Society, inside which there was Sakuma talking with Yūki. Now instead we see Sakuma leaving the General Staff Headquarters (and Yūki will join him in a moment).

Sakuma pauses in his track to observe the tram leaving (can I mention the scenery is beautiful?)

…then looks down to what he believes is his shadow and see it moving while he’s still standing still. He’s surprised then he realized what he thought was his shadow only was actually made by his shadow and Yūki’s shadow behind him as the man walks past him.

LOL, Yūki was actually literally shadowing him and he hadn’t realized. Well, it should have felt a little creepy.

Anyway, as Yūki walks past Sakuma ‘Sakura haru’ [桜春 Spring of cherry blossoms] begins playing.

Sakuma follows Yūki. The two walk along the moat were beautiful cherry trees are in bloom… which fits with the musical background. Their pink is almost shining and it’s a colour that stands out as we hadn’t seen it for two episodes. It catches our attention.

It’s Yūki that starts the conversation by telling Sakuma that ‘Miyoshi was impressed with you. You were really going to cut open your stomach there, weren’t you?’ I’ll say this implies Miyoshi wasn’t just impressed by how Sakuma figured out things but also by how he was really willing to die (which is sort of confirmed by an extra scene in ‘D no Maō’ in which Miyoshi discusses with Yūki how he didn’t expect Sakuma to really go and try to commit suicide). As said in the past rewatching I’ve discussed this topic at length here so here I’ll spare you a repeat of that discussion.

I wonder if Yūki also was impressed with Sakuma or if everything went according to Yūki’s plan and Sakuma acted as he expected.

Sakuma though still feel like he doesn’t deserve praises.

While he thinks that ‘it’s probably true’ that Miyoshi was impressed (it’s true, Sakuma, trust me) he still thinks he has noticed the second half of the situation way sooner than he did as he wouldn’t have considered Mutō would have set this up to cover his mistake. Sakuma, poor child, was betrayed by his superior officer, a coward and unfair action that he didn’t expect and that still burns. Someone give him a hug… he looks so down. He feels he never managed to join in the ‘joker game’ the other were playing at… though actually, even if only at the very end, he did. He managed to figure out all the ‘signs’ and guess which cards his opponent had. But well, I guess Sakuma is the sort who’s hard with others and harder on himself. Completely opposite of a certain Colonel…

Still… he can’t help but ask Yūki if his cane is a disguise. Well, actually his own is a statement more than a question. Yūki comments Sakuma has been asking questions and his eyes turn back… not that he can really see Sakuma since his head is still looking ahead himself, it’s just a visual clue to hint how Sakuma now has his full attention.

Sakuma making questions is… well, sort of important as Sakuma before seemed to accept everything as it was presented to him, without questioning it unless it clashed with what he was taught. Now instead he’s starting to look around himself without passively accepting things.

The camera moves closer to Sakuma and as ‘Yogiri’ [夜霧 Night fog] starts playing (smart idea by the way as the fog association fit well with the idea of disguise), we see a flashback of Sakuma remembering how he asked to the geisha if the guest had a lame leg or wore a glove and was answered ‘no’.

Remember how that seemed the end of it, as for Sakuma and for us viewer those were Yūki’s distinctive traits and if one didn’t have them… well, he couldn’t be Yūki?

Well, even if at first Sakuma too had thought that could be the end… he actually didn’t give up on it.

So he tosses to Yūki his theory. He claims Yūki doesn’t need his cane to walk and that he wears a glove on his right hand only to hide the fact that the damaged one is his left hand. In fact the glove, the cane and the limping attract attention and stop observers from focusing on the hand that’s truly damaged or, to be exact, prosthetic.

In short, those fake distinctive traits, work like some sort of disguise.

And how Sakuma found out all this? He got a forensic at the Imperial university to do an examination for him of the cigarette case. In short, yes, Sakuma didn’t give up. As soon as he got the cigarette case apparently his first thought wasn’t to get back at Mutō, no, he wanted to know how Yūki figured things out and if it could be there were chances he truly was the guest at the inn. Shiro Miwa said he draw Sakuma putting focus on his thick eyebrows, so one could tell he is a Japanese dog. Well, surely when Sakuma starts on hunting something, he doesn’t let it go. If Sakuma were German, Wolf would be proud of him.

Anyway Sakuma discovered that on the cigarette case there were only the fingerprints of Mutō, the Geisha owner of Hanabishi and himself. Meaning the fingerprints of the one returning the cigarette case and who wasn’t wearing gloves, were mysteriously missing… and this would be possible only if the hand he used to pick up the case were to be prosthetic.

Flashback to Mutō, completely drunk and dancing for the geisha. Oh, he’s a pitiful thing and a sight I’m trying to forget.

During the flashback Yūki comments not even him expected Mutō to be so idiotic to get drunk and then reveal state secrets to a geisha. Mutō definitely impressed Yūki… only he didn’t do it in a positive manner. -_-

The smart visual has the camera move from Mutō in the room of the inn he was in to the right of the viewer and past the wall, as if it was moving through it, so that it gets in the room Yūki was in and that’s next to Mutō. LOL, Yūki was there, apparently talking with geisha but actually listening to Mutō’s every word. What is he, Furudo Erika from Umineko?

Now… I don’t know if the sub made a blunder here but that ‘immediately after Mutō left I went out into the hall’ makes really me think Yūki was stalking Mutō more than just tailing him… but well, anyway, as he leaves he finds Mutō’s cigarette case and this is bad because he can’t pick it up with his good hand as he has a geisha wrapped around the arm at which his good hand is attacked so he has to use his prosthetic hand.

Now… I wonder if using his good hand would have changed things. Does the Army has his fingerprints? Probably, since Sakuma checked for fingerprints. Are the fingerprints that the Army have his real ones? Maybe not, that’s why it’s bad he couldn’t use his good hand.

And here it turns out Sakuma surprised Yūki too, because Yūki didn’t expect Sakuma to search for fingerprints on the cigarette case. Yūki smiles as he admits this and looks pleased.

Evidently he likes when Sakuma does good. I guess in his own way he likes Sakuma. Though the novel seems to imply he’s smiling because he’s thinking now Mutō is indebted to him, so maybe that’s it?

Anyway Yūki says that now that he has done a favour to Mutō, Mutō can’t help but cooperate with D Agency. I hope the ‘favour’ in Yūki’s plan was just ‘dealing with the cipher and Gordon in secrecy so that it won’t come up that Mutō inspected Gordon’s house and came up with nothing’ and not keeping hidden the fact that Mutō tattled out things. If it were to be the latter it would mean he set Sakuma to said such things knowing they would mislead Mutō into thinking Sakuma was part of the plot while he expected Sakuma to be actually in the dark… or maybe he didn’t expect Sakuma to deliberately make himself suspicious.

I mean… he might have thought Sakuma wouldn’t complain about not being warned that was the second inspection or, more importantly, not handing Mutō the cigarette case then telling him he knew Mutō tattled out military secrets and then claiming Yūki would keep silent about the matter. All this made Mutō think Sakuma betrayed him. If Sakuma had instead just finished his report and then handed the cigarette case and hadn’t mentioned knowing that Mutō revealed state secrets… well, Mutō would have probably gotten the message anyway but he might have not suspected Sakuma to be in.

Anyway, back to Yūki, he did all this because he wanted to squeeze money out of Mutō (anime viewers might not know but actually D Agency should have had a bigger budget only it got reduced along the way. Yūki wants the money he believed his agency deserved back.)

Sakuma is surprised as he figured out Yūki shadowed the Colonel only with the purpose to get more funds. LOL, I wonder if Sakuma was worried Yūki might have had some dark purpose to do it because, really, I can’t think he would consider Yūki doing this for fun or because he really enjoyed stalking Mutō. Come on, people can consider the Yūki/Wolf an interesting pairing but no one would take into consideration the Yūki/Mutō pairing, would they?

Anyway Yūki is smiling again as he asks Sakuma if he’d like to train as a spy under him. All right, I still think Yūki likes Sakuma in his own way.

And now ‘Kansō’ [歓送 Farewell] starts and it’s a fitting BGM to imply that Sakuma is going to part ways with the others… ;_;

Anyway at Yūki’s request Sakuma lowers his head and sighs. He seems sad.

The novel says he considered accepting but he didn’t feel up for it. The anime is a lot more vague. It’s unclear if what we hear is what he said or what he thinks as, when we hear his voice, we don’t see his face anymore, just Yūki’s back.

Well… Sakuma says ‘I’m a soldier through and through. I’m prepared to sacrifice myself at a moment’s notice.’ which is also a reference to how Sakuma ultimately was okay with committing Harakiri. He didn’t try to escape to it. And, of course, the implication that, since he’s a soldier, he can’t be a spy should be clear enough.

Sakuma stops in his track at this.

He’s not following Yūki anymore. So this is the visual too implying that Sakuma won’t accept Yūki’s offering, that Sakuma won’t follow him. Still, as he’s just standing there, Sakuma continues ‘speaking’ or ‘ making an inner monologue’ do your pick. He adds an ‘However…’ to his previous sentence then pauses. The visual shows him still under a cherry trees, petals falling on him. Cherry trees were one of the samurai symbols, and the falling petals were a symbol of a warrior’s death so the visual ties nicely with Sakuma, declaring to be a warrior and of being ready to die a warrior’s death. We see that Yūki is getting farther from him and this also reinforces the idea that Sakuma is not going to follow him, is not going to become a spy.

And here there’s another amazingly smart visual choice. A new element joins them. While Yūki is walking away from Sakuma, soldiers come and walk TOWARD Sakuma.

They seem to reinforce the implication that Sakuma has chosen them… that he has chosen to be a soldier… but Sakuma doesn’t follow them either and they walk past him. Yūki is far from him now, but Sakuma’s gaze is still on him as the soldiers also continue to walk past Sakuma.

And now Sakuma decides to end his sentence. ‘However,’ he begins and looks up at the sky, ‘I refuse to be a pawn who is used, then cast aside.’ The camera moves from Sakuma to the sky, till the sun comes into the picture. Sakuma’s sentence seems almost a challenge to the Gods. Sakuma is a man who’s not following anyone but himself. He’s not a spy but now he’s different from the soldiers who would humbly and mindlessly follow their commander.

The episode ends here. It’s a scene that’s slightly different from the one in the novel and in ‘D no Maō’ as in them Sakuma realized that wasn’t a thought a soldier should have and, in the novel, he was confused by it (as yes, in it too it was a thought a soldier shouldn’t have) but it’s acknowledged Sakuma can’t make that ‘new belief in him’ disappear, and his looking up at the sky is linked to doing so as if he’d hear someone snickering up there, while in the ‘D no Maō’ manga he dismissed such thought. The anime has a Sakuma that much more firm and confident in accepting he’s having thoughts soldiers shouldn’t have.

There’s to say ‘D no Maō’ made Sakuma’s refusal rather meaningful as, once he did it, he confesses to Yūki he’s going to be sent to the battlefield. In short, accepting Yūki’s offering would have spared him from going there and yet he refused, accepting his fate as a soldier and how it can lead him toward death. Ah, all the versions of Sakuma are cool in their own ways.

Oh, another side note. In the ‘Joker Game The Animation’ manga Sakuma delivers his final thoughts when he’s alone (the soldiers, those appearance was actually what made him realize he’s a soldier as well, have walked past him and Yūki has disappeared) and then he seems to disappear as well, as if to imply Sakuma has taken a third path, not the one Yūki took, nor the one of the soldiers but his own.

Still, that’s the end of ‘Joker Game’ Ep 2.

Ending theme.

We finish with the ‘preview for the next episode’ which, this time, is just a little bit of dialogue between the D Agency boys, one that we can’t say when it’s placed.

We’ve Hatano asking to Odagiri if he remembers that incident and Odagiri claiming he doesn’t. Hatano then drinks and tells him not to worry and that memories aren’t important. We see then glasses lying on the table and then Hatano wearing them claiming that ‘that was the right decision’.

It’s hard to say what they’re truly talking about, if what Odagiri doesn’t remember is the ‘incident’ that leaded him to become a D Agency student or something else. It might even be a fake story that he doesn’t remember an incident since the D Agency boys have all fake background stories as well as fake names. So we can’t really know.

Them talking so peacefully also contrasts a bit with how Hatano seems to have fun teasing Odagiri in Ep 12.

But well, the dialogue is mostly here to give us subtle hints about the next episode that will figure Hatano, disguising himself with glasses and suffering of amnesia but still managing to pull through and make the right decisions even without his memories.

Oh, by the way, during the preview we hear a bit of ‘Sakura haru’ [桜春 Spring of cherry blossoms], only here it’s cut short.

And this was Joker Game Ep 2. Thank you to everyone who was brave and patient enough to sit through my long, long ramblings for the whole episode. I hope other people will feel like sharing what they had observed while watching it!

#Joker Game #Sakuma #Miyoshi #Joker Game Anime #Yuuki #Kaminaga #Odagiri #John Gordon #Hatano #Jitsui #Fukumoto #Amari #Muto #JG Joker Game #Joker Game Random Thoughts #Joker Game ReWatching #Tazaki

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