Anime Weekly 7

A short post every Sunday, 9pm (I hope!) summarizing what I've watched in the past 7 days. Notable episodes this week have a (*) beside the episode number.

This week there was no Madoka either. Wandering Son's schedule was not affected by the earthquake, and Star Driver came back after a 1 week break, so this week I'll cover Star Driver 23, 24 and the rest of Wandering Son. Some minor spoilers inside for Star Driver which I don't think would really affect your enjoyment of the series anyway.

Star Driver 23

The twist at the end was kind of expected, but nevertheless it was awesome to see the... umm... flashy costume and the reaction of all the other Kiraboshi members. Although it was never really mentioned earlier in the series, the revelation of Takuto's dad was quite well executed. What wasn't well executed was how Takuto seemed to recognise him straight away with no hint of suspicion or surprise. He just jumped over and gave him a punch without any build up. Well, that's kind of his personality anyway I guess =/

Star Driver 24

Had a weird ending, but the build up really makes me look forward to the next episode. This episode did a few flashbacks and explained some of the character's motivations, but we're still in the dark about why Sugata  defected. Many other questions are still left unanswered (such as the school's 2 "aliens"), and we only have one episode left! I seriously have no idea how I'm going to rate the series. It has to pull off something really special for the last episode...

Wandering Son 9 (*)

You'll never expect a slice-of-life drama series like this to be able to build up tension like this. I would say this episode ranks up there in building up to a "boss battle" as Star Driver did, but with more consistency. When I first watched this episode, I was so impressed by its pacing and felt that they only needed the next episode to bring things up to a climax and the wrap it up the following episode. I was wrong....

Wandering Son 10+11 (**)

... but in a good way. The creators did something... weird by squeezing episodes 10 and 11 into one episode and then doing an additional episode 12 the next week. This is actually bucking the trend of production companies making their final episode only available on DVD, forcing you to buy it. Also, this gives the creator one extra episode to conclude the story! This episode 10+11 actually felt like 4 episode squeezed into one. They edited it in a way that doesn't feel too rushed in the important moments, but also manage to put in A LOT of plot. It was a simply amazing episode, a great example of how a fast-paced slice-of-life episode can be so engaging and interesting.

Wandering Son 12 (?)

There were many many great moments in this finale of Wandering Son. The production team has done a great job at choosing the right arcs of the manga to animate. I think psgels (over at Star Crossed Anime Blog) summed it up quite well regarding the production and characters. I'll be writing up my own review soon (probably in a week or two), so look out for that!


Sorry for the short impressions this week. Been really busy IRL... Anyway, on a brighter note...

The new season is here! I still haven't decide whether I should do impressions for every new series (almost no show continuing into the next season, so there are lot of new ones). Also, reviews for this season will most probably be sparse, since I can only properly review Star Driver and Wandering Son (Madoka is STILL on hiatus). I plan to go back and watch some of the other series I missed out though, so expect more reviews once my exams are over.