The Rising of the Shield Hero S3 – 06 – A Sliver of Strength

Amaki Ren liked to game. He was good at speedrunning Brave Star Online, but while he was fine having a girl over to watch, he avoided bigger crowds. When he ended up in another world, he discovered that the mechanics were identical to BSO, and thus attempted to speedrun it as well. Then he rushed headlong at the Spirit Tortoise and got his party killed.

Fast-forward to when Bitch swore her allegiance to him. The very next day she ditches him and steals all his equipment, leaving a note calling him “useless.” The same hero hunters who went after Naofumi last week chase Ren through the streets, but when he tries to hide in a citizen’s home she tells him to leave.

Nobody in the city wants the failed Sword Hero around, so he heads into the wilderness, where he runs afoul of some bandits and … snaps. Drawing power from a curse similar to Naofumi a while back, he kills all the bandits and steals the leader’s mask.

That brings us to last week’s cliffhanger, with Motoyasu fighting the masked Ren. When Naofumi arrives, Motoyasu explains to his “dad-to-be” that he’s defeating the bandit leader, who just happens to be Ren. Ren then attacks Naofumi, but Naofumi finds he’s become incredibly weak.

Once Naofumi determines Ren is under the influence of the Curse of Greed, he prepares to have S’yne and the others restrain him and take him back to town. But Eclair asks Naofumi to let her duel the Sword Hero. She believes she can knock some sense into him with swordsmanship and chivalry.

Eclair is ten times the swordsman Ren is, and even gets mad being beaten over and over again he draws from the Curse of Gluttony to summon monsters … which Eclair defeats with ease. Eclair assures Ren that with his heart in its current state, not knowing what he actually wants, there’s no way he can defeat her.

Sure enough, when Eclair gets serious Ren doesn’t stand a chance, and the dual curses eventually render him unable to even properly hold his sword. She knocks him to the ground and shatters his mask, and he ends up returning to his senses.

Eclair is about to lend him a hand up when the hero hunters arrive, causing Naofumi and Raphtalia to panic knowing how powerful they are. But to their shock, Motoyasu followed Naofumi’s advice to get stronger, and is strong enough to kill both of them in ten seconds flat.

Raph uses a spirit sword to slash their souls so they won’t come back this time (hopefully), and a blood-soaked Motoyasu, who is in better spirits but also quite bonkers, ends up scaring the crap out of Filo again, causing her to revert to bird form and flee.

With the hero hunter’s interruption over, Eclair reaches out a hand and helps him up. He may be weak now, but she’s sure there’s a sliver of strength in him. Sure enough, he seems to have been killed when he protected some classmates from a man with a knife.

That took strength, and Eclair offers to get stronger with him together. He can worry about the reason he wants to get stronger later. Now, a Ren-centric episode was kinda the last thing I wanted, but Eclair kinda saved it at the end by being her awesome self, and gaining a training partner with a high ceiling.

Synduality: Noir – 09 – Not So Black and White

While driving through the rain on his way to Traders Nest with a sleeping Noir, Kanata witnesses gunfire outside: a lone Drifter taking out a Coffin that seems to be infected with a parasitic Ender. The pilot than hops out and walks through the rain without a protective suit, which is definitely abnormal.

Kanata continues on his way, and when he arrives at Traders Nest he immediately geeks out at all the stuff that’s for sale, particularly cheap second-hand Coffin components. Noir, borrowing Maria’s words, says that no matter how old they are, men can still turn into boys at the drop of a hat.

While Kanata does look like a boy in a metal candy shop, the pilot who walked through the rain strides in like a full-grown man, his very Noir-y looking Magus in tow. The shopkeeper says word is the guy is watertight and has been piloting a Coffin since the collapse of Amasia and is responsible for Amasia’s collapse.

Rumors also indicate the man knows his way around Magus memory, something Kanata is very interested in. But he’s so excited, he asks the man to talk to him without so much as introducing himself. The man walks off with his Magus without responding, leaving Kanata only with the knowledge that Noir is good at shoplifting.

That would have been that, except they run into the man’s Magus in the food market while she’s buying a ludicrous amount of soy sauce (and Kanata and Noir are admiring real organic bananas). The Magus, named Ada, is a lot friendlier than her master, Alba.

When Kanata describes Noir’s issues, Ada (voiced by Ishikawa Yui) says it’s normal for a Magus to reformat their memory after their previous contract is terminated. Unless Noir is from a lab during the “Amasia period”, Alba may be able to dig deeper into Noir’s primary memory. Noir wants to do this, because she believes there’s more to her than she currently is.

After Ada serves Kanata and Noir real coffee, Alba returns from an errand and grudgingly agrees to lend his know-how to potentially help Noir. The process will take some time, though not a full day, and Noir will be in Sleep Mode for the duration. Kanata need only stay by her side during the reboot.

The parasitic Enders pick this time to attack Traders Nest, and a trio of Magus-less Drifters are too weak to handle it, with one of them losing their life without much fanfare. Alba sorties with Ada and tells the remaining two Drifters to buzz off so he can do his job.

Ada unleashes “Ignition”, her Magus Skill, and incinerates all of the parasitic Enders in one fell swoop. Among the derelict Coffins is one from Amasia, so Alba checks it out, but insists on doing it alone while Ada stays in their Coffin.

When Noir comes to, Alba and Ada learn that Noir has no abnormalities, and that no further memory data exists within her system. However, they also learn that she’s essentially been operating in a constant state of overdrive. While it explains why she sleeps so much, it’s a little anticlimactic that that’s all we learn about her.

Noir apologizes for still being a “dud”, but of course Kanata doesn’t feel that way about her. If she doesn’t have any old memories, they’ll just have to keep making new ones, and snapping more photos along the way. In private, Ada makes mention to Alba of a “black box” within Noir that they could not open or decipher, so some mysteries yet remain within her.

The Eminence in Shadow – 01 (First Impressions) – Bringing a Crowbar to a Gun Fight

After being kidnapped by a stalker, Nishino Akane is chaffeured to school and back, and maintains an eager-to-please mask for both her teachers and peers. There’s just one kid at school who doesn’t remember her name or look her way: Kagenou. That kinda pisses her off. Kagenou doesn’t seem to care.

One night Akane must walk home when her chaffeur doesn’t answer, and she’s swiftly kidnapped again by a pair of bad dudes bent on holding her for random. One of them isn’t even above assaulting her, but thankfully for Akane, Kagenou saw her be abducted, and has come to rescue her. Before he does he removes several extremely heavy weights he’d been wearing all day like they were nothing.

He smashes through the warehouse skylight and announces himself as the “Stylish Ruffian Slayer”, dispatching the gangster-style baddie with ease, then going to town on an ex-military connoisseur of violence. While fighting him, Kagenou goes into great detail about how great crowbars are as a weapon, then demonstrates it by whaling on the guy before untying Akane and vanishing.

Akane realizes that Kagenou, like her, was also wearing a mask around others. She never gets a chance to confirm if he was her savior, however, as he falls victim to Truck-kun and gets—you guessed it—reincarnated in another world full of magic and fantasy.

While in his old world and life there was only so much building muscle and martial arts training could achieve, but here he’s shed those limits, determined not to be the Hero or the Villain of the world, but rather the mastermind behind the scenes controlling everything—the titular Eminence in Shadow, flanked by seven female assassins.

This week is a succinct if somewhat tonally ambiguous prologue for the “fantasy action comedy” to come. Some isekai start with the lad already having been in the new world for a while, others spend several episodes getting him there. I daresay including a scene of attempted sexual assault probably isn’t a great idea if you’re trying to be tongue-in-cheek.

That said, next week we’re surely in for something completely different, as Kagenou’s chuuni tendencies are now perfectly at home in the new world he inhabits. So I’d say it’s worth at least one more look.

Classroom of the Elite – 01 (First Impressions)

As per a reader’s suggestion, I’ve decided to contribute to our Summer ’17 “reboot” by taking a look at a show I initially overlooked—Classroom of the Elite.

We follow Ayanokouji Kiyotaka, who has enrolled at the prestigious Tokyo Metropolitan Advanced Nurturing School, which sports a 100% college and employment placement rate. Aside from being built on reclaimed land in the bay, TMANS is a fully self-contained “high school city”, and its students given free reign and a generous monthly stipend of 100,000 yen-equivalent points ($903). It’s a neat and efficiently-explained system.

While cliques quickly form, Ayanokouji fails to make any friends, aside from the girl who insists on being friends with everyone (Kushida Kikyou) and the girl who is friends with no one by choice (Horikita Suzune). Thankfully there’s no onslaught of characters: these three are the focus, and rightly so.

Kushida, desperate to make friends with the last holdout, conspires with Ayanokouji to meet with Horikita at the school’s Starbucks. Horikita immediately suspects she’s been set up and storms off, while Kushida sticks around with Ayanokouji, and seems to think that Horikita and Ayanokouji are “close”, even though neither of them would charactarize it that way (aside from their physical proximity in the classroom).

Ayanokouji and Horikita have a lot in common. They use few words (he has trouble getting them out, she prefers not to talk), and both are reasonably thrifty, spending very little of their points over the first month. Meanwhile, all of their Class D classmates spend wildly and talk, goof off, and sleep in class regularly, conduct their teacher Chabashira doesn’t call them out for.

But one of the great things about this first episode is that while laying out this school system, there’s tension that builds amongst all the “debauchery” and carefree-ness. Like the other shoe is about to drop, and it’s going to be a doozy.

That other shoe…turns out to be the fact that monthly stipend is not 100,000 points. It’s just a starting number; henceforth students are judged by merit, and the next stipend determined accordingly; in this case, ZERO. Despite having done pretty well for themselves, our protagonists receive the same valuation as their slacker classmates.

At least they instinctively understood that the money and many temptations around them were all a test that most of the class failed. If they keep failing, they’ll go nowhere, so some serious shaping up is in order. That’s a hell of a hook, ensuring I’ll be back for the next episode.

ReLIFE – 02

The test scores are in, and a great many things become known. In ten years, Kaizaki forgot between 75% and 96% of everything he learned in high school the first time around. Kariu is mad about losing the class rep job to Hishiro not because she can’t get free lunches, but because she has feelings for Ooga. Finally, Onoya has even worse test scores than Kaizaki…and she’s a real high schooler!

These two need tutoring, and Ooga is happy to serve the role as tutor, but gets more than he bargained for when Kaizaki and An start digging into his relationship with Kariu, including their matching earrings. I’m liking how quickly yet naturally the circle of friends is coming together.

I also liked Kaizaki’s outsize reaction to An whipping out her cell phone; once a capital crime in his day, now students use them with impunity (outside of class, that is). Or how he takes Hishiro’s reaction to his lending her 1000 yen (that he’s like a grown-up) literally; worried the brainy girl is on to him.

Hishiro comes to dominate the latter half of the episode as Kaizaki makes it his mission to get her to come out of her shell a little more. The fact her forced smiles are so disconcerting is proof of how genuine and straightforward she is; the only smiles she can make are real ones, all of which were triggered by Kaizaki being nice to her.

At the beginning of the episode, Hishiro has no friends; now she has one, and of her own choosing, boldly asking for Kaizaki’s phone number. Hishiro really shines in this episode, greatly aided by her adorable character design…and Kayano Ai’s adorable voice.

Ryou, who was skulking around corners the whole episode, observing Kaizaki from a distance, not only suggests he try to quit smoking (the smell lingers, plus no one will sell to someone with his new babyface), but also not to get too attached to anyone. Apparently, when the year-long experiment is over, everyone young Kaizaki interacted with will forget him, because he’ll be back to being 27.

Not like that’s something he’ll be able to explain if they every learned, but this still seems like a downer, especially considering Kaizaki will remember them, and will likely not feel so great as a result. When Hishiro told Kaizaki she had to rush things, that this was her last chance, it reminded him how confident he was that his future would go the way he thought it would.

It didn’t, and ReLIFE is ostensibly the path to getting somewhere closer to his ideal future (or even creating a new one). But having to sever all his new bonds at the end of the year seems like a steep price to pay for that future. As I watch the next eleven episodes (at my own pace), it will be interesting to see if he ever tries to haggle over that price. Hishiro—callsign “Sorry Cat”—is someone worth knowing. Could she also be a bond worth preserving, even if it breaks Ryou’s rules?

Tanaka-kun wa Itsumo Kedaruge – 05

After expertly establishing Shiraishi as a rounded, rootable, easily-to-empathize-with character, this week’s Tanaka-kun begins with a supermarket mystery: what did Tanaka’s sister want him to buy?

This initial segment accomplishes and reiterates so much with such a simple premise. Ohta is the kind of dependable all-rounder every woman in the store wants in their family or for their daughter’s (or their) husband…and he’s all Tanaka’s. 

Thanks to the process of elimination and a clue in the form of a single letter Past Tanaka sent as a reminder, they narrow the mystery items down to things starting with “P”, including pancakes. Ohta glows with maternal pride as Tanaka shuffles off into the sunset, shopping mission accomplished.

Unfortunately, Tanaka’s choices were wrong on all counts: his sister wanted pipe (i.e. drain) cleaner, and if he was going to get her pancakes, she wanted the ones from the specific place in the TV ad. Nevertheless, she made him dinner out of all of the (strong-smelling) ingredients he brought home.

We’ve yet to meet Tanaka or Ohta’s sisters, but there’s much that can be gleaned from just this indirect contact with her: she tries to push Tanaka beyond his boundaries of listlessness and uselessness.

With that segment to open, I expected to finally meet a sister or two, but again the show demonstrated its penchant for restraint: why not spend more time with Shiraishi, since she’s fresh in our minds from last week?

Now that she’s more comfortable in her own skin, Shiraishi is coming to notice other things beyond what people think of her. Specifically, she’s pretty sure she’s fallen for Tanaka, as the lovely watercolor prologue to her segment aptly shows (Ohta showing up just when she’s about to place her hand on Tanaka’s sleeping shoulder).

Mind you, she’s still Shiraishi, and considers a “former dweeb” and loner such as herself falling in love to be the height of arrogance. We spend most of the balance of the episode in her churning head space, and are thus treated to the best kind of rom-com inner mon.

Shiraishi wants to carry Tanaka on piggyback, but knows she can’t do that without getting a little closer to him. But how? She informs her two best girlfriends of her predicament, and they throw their moral support behind her.

Her initial idea is to learn more about Tanaka through Ohta’s interactions with him, since Tanaka hardly has interactions with anyone else (and no one is closer). At first I thought this was a classic recipe for Ohta mistaking her crush as for him, but the show wisely avoids that kind of trouble.

Instead, Ohta proves useful to her, clearing the path for her that much more by asserting that it’s unlikely Tanaka has a girlfriend or someone he likes at the moment.

But then Shiraishi hits an apparent roadblock when she enters the classroom to find Miyano is already there by Tanaka’s desk (where she wants to be) having a spirited conversation about…something (a conversation she doesn’t think she’d ever be able to have with him.)

It’s a scene with few important words (Miyano is just rambling as Tanaka nods) but so much runs across Shiraishi’s face as the camera draws in closer to it, and her and Miyano’s eyes meet.

Of course, Shiraishi has the wrong idea: Miyano isn’t Tanaka’s girlfriend or anything like that. After retreating, Miyano pulls her back, seemingly knowing what’s up, and presents her to Tanaka as another new apprentice (one she can call kohai).

This is a misunderstanding, and it could have easily stayed that way, but again, Tanaka-kun isn’t a show that always goes the easy or predictable route. Shiraishi recognizes this opportunity for what it is, and pulls the trigger: She wants to be Tanaka’s friend, not an apprentice.

After Tanaka’s response—sure…and anyway, we already are friends—you can feel all the stress and worry melt away for Shiraishi, replaced by relief and joy. She didn’t take the first step—that was already taken—but now she recognizes that she took it, and the pressure is off, for now.

Miyano tells Shiraishi they’re friends too, and when the three exchange emails, covertly offers her support in what she now knows Shiraishi’s goal to be.

There’s no competition or rivalry here: Shiraishi wants to be Tanaka’s, she can be. She just has to keep taking things one step at a time, while believing in her own worth.

Tanaka doesn’t appreciate the magnitude of his words to Shiraishi yet, but nor is he the kind of guy who’d ignorantly deny or dismiss out of hand someone liking him. I wonder what his sister would say about this development!

Divine Gate – 01 (First Impressions)

Many years ago, Noriyuki Abe wasted no time drawing me into a world where a youth named after a berry, who looked like a delinquent to many around him, actually had a very kind and generous heart. He could also see and talk to ghosts, which is how he met his first shinigami; a very cute one who sucked at drawing.

I’m talking, of course, about Bleach, my first extended foray into serialized anime. There’s a lot of that same welcoming, beckoning quality coming off his latest work Divine Gate, as well as its exploration of spirituality and mythology. It’s a hard feeling to put into words, but Active Raid didn’t have it; not for me at least. Divine Gate, like Bleach, did.

In DG the normal human world is just the normal human world, but there are two other worlds: a world of fairies and a world of demons. A few of those humans have elemental powers, and work under Arthur of the World Council either as full-fledged members or academy students like Akane and Midori.

Then there’s Aoto, who’s clearly a powerful water-user, even without a power-enhancing driver, but wants nothing to do with the Council, despite Arthur’s believe his powers will help maintain peace between the three worlds. Instead of attending a school that will help him hone his powers, he’s at regular old school, where his peers shun him as the infamous “parent-killer.”

Even though most of Aoto’s early dialogue is internal (and quite flowery), the fact I can hear what he’s thinking is an effective way of drawing me into his world and his plight. He’s mopey and morose, but there are very good reasons for it.

Meanwhile, since this is a show about elements and colors, his moroseness is balanced by his would-be academy mates. Akane outwardly mocks Midori for actually believing in the titular “Divine Gate” that will grant any wish once opened with the power of all the elements, but somewhere in the heart of every student and Council member is a desire to encounter that gate, their individual wishes ready to go.

Midori and Akane meet Aoto twice, but neither encounter goes particularly well. He’s got a wall up, one they don’t—and can’t—quite understand, anymore than they understand right now how a kid could really kill his parents—which Aoto freely admits when the subject comes up (though I’m not sure he’s being truthful).

But the flashback makes it clear: Aoto was the family pariah; his parents doting on the younger son while he was exiled to a shed in the backyard eating cold food. His brother knew of his plight, but also knew Aoto had the power to do something about it, so he did nothing, instead doing whatever he wanted.

So Aoto endured a thoroughly cold and loveless upbringing. Why exactly, we don’t know. The “rain” (his tears) continues to fall unendingly inside him. He doesn’t believe power can do anything, because he’s always had it and it’s never done him any good. But perhaps, with more interaction with other perspectives and elements, those inner clouds could break one day, and he’ll find that wish to be used at the Gate.

DG effortlessly drew me into its world; it’s a place I wouldn’t mind coming back to next week. Not sure about the show’s logo, though. Tilted Impact? Really?