Behind The Nihon Review

Finally the last part of a post series that exactly no one is interested in.  But I intend the finish what I started, and the reason I didn’t finish it earlier is because it’s the middle of the busy review-writing period.  I’ve had three reviews published in the last couple of weeks and another three to come soon.  Anyway, as Special A entered its final episodes, it entered its strongest phase, but that still doesn’t completely save it from some seriously shonky execution.  Again, this post has spoilers, but they only really matter if you intend to watch this show, or are only part way through it.

Ep 18

A cute and romantic ending to this episode, but, ugh, goddamn we’ve had to go through some crap to get this far. The romance has been ok, but so little of it has been momentous, and I’m not convinced that the pay off is a big enough reward for the patience needed to get through some pretty frustrating moments during the first part of this series.

This marked the episode where Tadashi and Akira became a couple and while romantic progress was certainly refreshing, even throughout this episode there were a number of pretty pointless over-the-top slapstick moments that really detracted from the whole thing.

Ep 19

Megumi’s seiyuu finally earns her pay check. But, oh man, so moe I’m gonna die.

I don’t think there’s anything particularly groundbreaking about the dynamic between Megumi and Yahiro, but I do like the basis for their relationship. She’s someone who actually understands him (a total rarity for Yahiro), while I think that she sees him as a bit of a challenge. It’s probably the most interesting dynamic in the show so far (but, in all honesty, that’s not saying much).

Yahiro still has a lot of growing up to do, but he’s been given a “saviour” in a sense, in the form of Megumi. But her actions in this episode made her very difficult to dislike. She must have infinite patience to have been able to handle Yahiro throughout this episode the way she did. Just like Takishima, who I can totally understand why he has to destroy punching bags to keep his sanity. Hikari will be the death of him, I’m certain.

Nothing much was really made of this after this episode, though.  A consequence of it being an anime based on an on-going manga, I suppose…

Ep 20

The last few episodes have followed a bit of a pattern that I haven’t been totally disapproving of, even if the show still is laden with its usual flaws and general awkwardness. We get these incredibly sweet and romantic moments which make for the series’ payoffs, but we have to go through this awkward mishmash of “light” and “serious”, the former of which is rarely funny and the latter of which is rarely subtle enough to be truly dramatic, and the two together make for a jarring mix.

I’m not sure I’d call the romance in this a redeeming factor, but it is the obvious highlight of the show. But, here we go again with an antagonist introduced in the final few episodes which is set to cause a conflict and who seeks to upset the current equilibrium. I hope this adds something substantial to the show, other than Kei arriving at the predictable conclusion that he likes his current lifestyle and is willing to fight to keep it that way, because it’s such a cliched direction to take a show like this. 

Ep 21

None of this really changed my opinion that Kei and Hikari are the most boring coupling in this show. Kei is still some sort of robot (and has the personality to match) and Hikari’s still thick as two bricks. Of course he was going to get through those two bricks to her eventually… but the amount of energy expended to get through to her is enough to wear anyone out.

This is about where the romantic subplots surrounding the side characters ended and we entered the final arc of the anime.  I really didn’t like the fact they needed to introduce a new antagonist who was basically a personality-less plot device into the fold the spice up the drama, but things didn’t quite go in the exact direction I predicted.  But it did all reset in the end, as I’ll get to soon.

Ep 22

Dear all anime characters,
Please remember to turn off your mobile phones before the confession scene.

Resets in romance anime make me RAGE!

This lead to a bit of a discussion about resets in romantic anime (one of my most hated tropes) which lead to a few posts about School Rumble.  I won’t copy them, but I’ll give the gist.  School Rumble would have been golden if they took all the crap out of it.  I wouldn’t quite say this show is of the same standard, but I don’t think it’s hard to see that it too would have been a lot more enjoyable if it had much less crap.

Shiroth
It doesn’t help that the scene before that one (Hikari in her bedroom) was a perfect set up for her to go and talk to Kei more about the situation. Not once did i think what i was seeing was going to be a dream.

I was with it until the flowers exploded in a burst of light. At that point, I was like “WTF!”. I’m glad that turned out to be a dream. It was the only scene in the entire episode that had a good reason for being completely over-the-top.

Ep 23

That was way too over-the-top… even for this series. It wasn’t just a bunch of events, everything that happened was an explosion of faux tragedy and angst and overwrought emotions. Jun and Megumi weren’t just withdrawn from school, they were sent to another country. Akira wasn’t just withdrawn from school, she had to deal with the fact that the Takishima group was threatening to crush her family’s company like a plastic cup. Hikari was chasing after planes, Takishima was swinging through the trees like Tarzan and Tadashi was bungee jumping out of classrooms. And between all of this, we’re supposed to take the drama in this seriously? Has this show no sense of restraint… oh wait. Don’t answer that…

I want to know more about Aoi and why he’s so ardently loyal to Takishima’s grandfather. At this stage, he’s pretty much just a plot device.

A summary of one of the major problems that dogged this anime.

Ep 24

About what I expected from the final ep. Not brilliant, not terribly momentous, but servicable enough. The way S.A. infiltrated the building and cut one member at a time to allow the rest of the group to get past each obstacle was a real cliche, and it eventually became predictable which character was going to be jettisoned, and what exactly they’d do to distract the villains to keep the rest of the group going. That I can tolerate.

But how about the lapse in logic? Aoi, fervent follower of the word of God, aka Grandfather Takishima, after conniving and conspiring and manipulating to tear S.A. apart to get Kei to come to London suddenly decides that Hikari’s persistence is enough of a thorn in his side that he’s better off letting Kei run free. What? It’s always been obvious that Aoi was a plot device, but before he was just annoying. This was ridiculously stupid. And we didn’t once get to see old man Takishima. Where’s our grand clash of ideologies?

Overall, there were a lot of things that weren’t well done in this show and a few things that were. After all of that, I really don’t think this is the type of show I’d recommend, not when there’s a plethora of shoujo romance series that I’d consider better. I guess whether one would enjoy this would depend a lot on one’s tolerance of slapstick and over-the-top antics which dominated the early episodes. The pay-off is obviously the various romances, but the question is, are these romances good enough that they make wading through all the crap of the earlier episodes worth it? You see, if this were School Rumble, I’d answer “yes” (mind you, the first few episodes of School Rumble were really funny, IMO, it wasn’t until the second season that things started to noticeably drag). The short version: two things would have made this show better, IMO… less contests and Hikari no being so thick.

Look, in all honesty, I didn’t really mean to come off as quite this negative.  I think the few people that ever read this all the way through will probably be turned off this anime forever, and that wasn’t quite my intention.  My review was probably slightly less scathing, but it’s certainly no resounding recommendation.  I think, in the end, “Average” really summs this anime up nicely.  It is a genre piece, but even as a genre piece it’s pretty mediocre.  *Shrug*.  I guess this was an interesting exercise, though.