Shin no Nakama – S2 11 – The Wavering Hero

The truce with Van doesn’t last long, as he refuses to leave Zoltan. He’s also going through what he believes to be a necessary trial: he’s no longer getting impulses from his Hero’s Blessing. When Albert heads into the woods to save a little girl, she’s with Kukururu, a tiny fay dragon that means no harm. So of course when Van shows up he wants to kill it.

Albert won’t let him, and even though he knows he’s no match for the Hero, he still does everything he can to delay him from taking an innocent life. Before Albert becomes that person, Esta interrupts the battle, positively teeming with rage against Van for hurting the man she’s fallen for. She knocks off his armor and beats the shit out of him.

Lavender prepares to intervene, but she’s interrupted by Undine. But Lavender even looks down on a water archfay, considering her no match for her. Yet before she can unleash an attack with her full power behind it, she’s very nearly sliced in two … by Ruti, from several hundred yards away in the woods. With his most loyal followed wounded and his armor wrecked, Van retreats, but is now excited to have his primary target in sight.

He returns to town and stabs Cardinal Ljubo, declaring he’ll kill anyone and destroy everything if that’s what it takes to defeat Ruti. Back in the Undine’s domain, Albert will make a full recovery, but Esta is still surprised that her love for him made her anger take over for the first time in her life. Red assures her that her emotions have nothing to do with her Blessing, but come from her heart, and he’s glad when she says she won’t cast her feelings for Albert aside.

Rit, Tisse, Yarandrala and Danan join Red, Ruti, and Esta in preparation to take on Van as a team. Undine warns them that Lavender is no slouch either, but a calamity, the last of the mythical archfay Ketu, an avatar of terrible power and destruction. But Red isn’t worried. In fact he believe they have a weaker target in a wavering, lost Van than the earlier one who was so certain in his faith.

Van takes the bait and lets himself and Lavender get trapped on an island surrounded by a multi-layer barrier set up by Undine, Yarandrala, and Esta. Van tosses a bronze sword Van’s way and challenges him to a one-on-one duel in which they’ll fight until one of them falls. No doubt Van will be talking a lot during the fight to come, further confusing Van and throwing him off balance.

Meanwhile, Rit won’t let anyone get in the way of her love, and neither will Lavender. Van’s “belief” that Lord Demis has tasked him with killing the previous Hero in order to become a true one is nothing but a shot in the dark from a boy who, bereft of any other guidance or moral compass, has chosen to focus all of his effort on Ruti.

But even if Van was more powerful than her (I’d estimate they’re about equal), he’s in much worse shape mentally, and she’s got a lot more friends—her real Hero’s Party. She has a Big Brother who isn’t about to lose to a petulant whelp who’d rather burn the world to the ground than face his doubts. It should be a fun battle!

The Faraway Paladin – 09 – A Wyvern in Whitesails

Will, Menel, Bee and Tonio arrive in Whitesails, and Will is understandably overwhelmed by how big and full of people and activity it is. Bee suggests the quartet wash off the road at the local public bathhouse and then grab a bite to eat at a local tavern. After that, Will gets down to business.

He arrives at Whitesails’ main temple, a gigantic classical structure that feels more like a tourist trap. After meeting with an acolyte, he encounters the temple’s head bishop, Bagley, who is a gruff, no-nonsense operator who nonetheless can sense the power of Will’s faith, and approves having him added to the priestly registry. I’m sure we’ll see more of Bagley, along with the Vice Bishop (the young woman in the end credits) soon.

Will and his party aren’t able to relax long in the cushy accommodations the clergy provides as a perk of his registration, as the city is suddenly attacked by a wyvern. Within seconds it manages to destroy crucial infrastructure, kill dozens, and leave hundreds more in a state of chaos. Will hurries to meet the threat, but initially lashes out with his longest-range lightning magic, and misses.

Menel gets Will to calm down and focus, and summons the faeries to help Will create a lightning spider web that brings the wyvern down to the ground. Once there, the wyvern threatens to spread both its fire breath and a dark miasma all over the temple grounds, but Will first spears it in the midsection then relies on Blood’s hand-to-hand training to wrestle the beast down and break its neck.

He does this in full view of dozens of shocked bystanders, who aren’t quite sure how to react to what they just saw. That’s where Bee and Tonio come in. Bee strums her lute and sings a song of the Wyvern Killer saving the city, and Tonio ensures word of their friend’s heroism will spread throughout the city. In this regard, Will’s party truly is optimized for both creating and distributing his growing legend.

Killing the wyvern also gets Will an audience with Ethelbard, the fair and honorable young lord of Whitesails and all of Southmark. That said, their meeting is a bit tense, as it was when Will first entered the temple, as Ethel isn’t quite sure who he’s dealing with or what to make of him. That soon changes when he learns that half of Will’s party wasn’t directly involved in the battle, and that he did most of the work.

After officially thanking him for saving the city, Ethel asks if there’s any reward he’d want, and Will is ready: he wants Ethel to send troops to the Beast Woods to aid the villages suffering demon attacks. Ethel says that’s a tough ask, as his forces are already spread thin, and the dark miasma turns any beings it touches into savages, further complicating matters.

Will requests an alternative: he will use his own funds to raise an army of mercenaries and adventurers to protect those areas Ethel’s armies cannot. Ethel immediately sees this as a potential threat to his authority, even if Will doesn’t intend it as such, and even weighs the pros and cons of simply killing Will before he becomes too much of a problem.

Obviously he’s not going to be killing Will—I doubt Gracefeel will allow that!—but the more macro Will’s efforts become, the more he bumps up against established powers and enters a realm in which he’s all too green: politics. Again, this is where an expert merchant like Tonio and an expert storyteller in Bee will surely come in handy.

Amagi Brilliant Park – 09

Amagi Brilliant Park 9 is kind of a let down, honestly. Where last week was an original feeling, tightly packed narrative that developed Kanie-kun through the characters around him and was also exploding with funny, this week was… even more tightly packed, but cliche and focused on the Faerie quartette: Windy Sylphy, Earthy Koboli, the leader girl who’s name I never remember and Fiery Salama.

Episode 8 was knowingly cliche, in that the main cast spent most of the episode watching and giving critical commentary on the Faeries’ ordeal but… it just wasn’t that funny. Just commenting on cliches isn’t interesting unless there’s a twist and, by the closing credits, the twist seems to be that it really was a cliche all along.

To sum up: the Faeries are having a hard time bringing their dance act together and Princess Latifah plots to solve their differences with a fake sukiyaki dinner party that almost immediately turns into a team-building exercise to save the park and become true friends.

Latifah literally tells them that the big red button in the corner must not be pushed or something really bad will happen. Then she walks out of the room to get more sauce for dinner and the girls accidentally end up pushing it.

So Latifah’s castle turns into an awesome steam-punk fortress, bristling with cannons and the only way it can be turned off without shutting down the park all Saturday is for the Faeries to accomplish 4 challenges together and push another red button.

The first challenge is karaoke, the second is a DDR game, the third is a typing game and the last is a game of death…

Aside from the game of death, each game is tailored to one faerie being really good at it and another being really bad, and that it must be resolved by the really good one working extra hard to make up the bad player’s slack. I’m not actually sure this would be a positive experience, really, since one player is always really really terrible at it and doesn’t get better…

As for the death game, all I can say is what? I know that’s the point, but it’s weird that the green faerie doesn’t get her own challenge and the finale is just about self sacrifice. It somehow misses it’s own conventions and isn’t even parody anymore.

The good: As always, ABP looks as good as you can look without having Fate/Stay Night’s budget. The castle was especially good looking too.

And don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of humorous parts and plenty for all the side characters we’ve built up during the season to do.

The bad: putting the funniest characters in a room together and having them MST3K/Rifftrax an episode sounds like a good idea but doesn’t work here. The simple problem is ABP is funny because it’s smart and plays with conventions… it’s never been funny because it’s so dumb.

Likewise, choosing to develop characters who aren’t plot central — who actually worked very well as second or third tier characters — felt like wasted effort. Unnecessary.

I greatly respect what this episode was doing. I mean, Mystery Science Theatre is a great idea and something I don’t think I’ve seen trickle into anime humor before. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work with ABP’s style.

In hindsight, it probably would have worked marvelously if Chuujou Shiina and the other new hires from Sento’s nightmare had been chosen instead of the faeries. There’s more emotional attachment to them and more mystery. Oh well…

In closing, ABP8 is the flip side of last week’s coin: where last week I probably could have rated it a 10, this week I could probably have rated it an 8. I won’t retcon last week’s rating so we’ll leave this as a 9, the absolute minimum of a 9, and call it even ;0

Special ‘variation enabled’ precision rating for Preston (aka SVEPRfP) 9.01 (down .98 from last week)

 

 

Amnesia – 12 (Fin)

Ukyou chases the heroine around the burning church with a knife, but keeps changing back to his gentle, caring self, who tells her her death in this church started everything. He wished she could live, and Orion’s creator, Neil, granted his wish by sending him to worlds where she was still alive, but only one of them could live in whatever world they ended up in. He stabs himself to stop the evil him from killing her. She ends up in limbo, where Orion explains what happened. Neil thanks her for restoring his powers. Neil in turn will restore her memories and let her return to her original world.

We’ll be honest, we were dreading both the possibility that this would go on for another slow, deliberate season, or worse, the ending wouldn’t be told until who-knows-when in some future film of OVA. Fortunately, neither happened, and we got a definite end that competently explained the mystery of the heroine’s predicament, Ukyou’s full role, and the real reason Orion was by her side for most of her journey. Most of these answers are delivered rather matter-of-factly through exposition, much of it either happening while Nice Ukyou peeks his persona in or by Orion in the checkered limbo when the cycle finally breaks. We’re somewhat conflicted with regards to whether all the explanation at the end works (the pop-up monitor Orion uses to show recaps flashbacks is pretty silly).

On the one hand, we liked the idea of a wish gone wrong, Ukyou causing far more trouble for himself and his lover just because he wanted to see her again, and worlds that don’t like people who aren’t supposed to be there. On the other hand, neither Orion or Ukyou really earned the emotional resonance this episode was trying to peddle, the four other dudes are completely abandoned  and while we really wanted to see just a smidgen of the heroine’s world, the end did not provide. Finally, the big NEIL reveal…just didn’t do anything for us. When weighing the pros and cons, this is a fittingly good but not great finale to a good but not great series.

Rating: 6 (Good)

Stray Observations:

• For the record, when he’s in control, Evil Ukyou is not that good at carrying out what he says needs to be done in a prompt and efficient manner. It’s not as if the heroine is particularly fast.
• That is one massive, slow-burning church, and the flames are remarkably smoke free. No asphyxiation for our heroine! 
• The end credits didn’t feature a heartwarming shot of the heroine locked in Toma’s Cage of Happiness.