We finally got some back story on Rea’s father. We are given a time skip in the second half of the last episode and somehow everyone is cool with each other when they finally meet up despite all of them leaving on a negative note. Kaoru even started pining for Sentaro by getting sulky and being a drama queen, and that queen part is pretty apt considering how he was reacting to Sentaro disappearing and keeping his distance from his own girlfriend, Ritsuko. All of a sudden Sakamichi no Apollon turned into a soap opera. Things were going swell with the odd bit of drama now and then. At first we had a story about friendship and music. These final episodes were rather disappointing (which is a recurring thought I have this season).
Also, at the time of writing this post I have heard there is a movie on the way too. Towards the end Marika seemed to have surpassed even a lot of the veteran pirates, and they all seemed to acknowledge her. Her being tsundere about it makes the scene rather cute. It was good seeing Chiaki be impressed by Marika and want to compliment her. I also want to mention the scene where Marika has had the Bentenmaru confront the ship destroying pirates. I want to see more of the dude in the screencap, who looks like a space version of Tiger from Tiger & Bunny. What this arc does well, aside from warfare, is introducing new characters and having some nice twists. The premise of this arc isn’t all that great since basically about a spaceship that goes around blowing up pirates. I liked the political and world setting nature of the show, but it’s clear that its strengths lie in spaceship combat. Mouretsu Pirates has been fantastic these past three episodes. To think I liked this show at one point fills me with anger. As for the conclusion, it was just the usual asspulls and shit that doesn’t make sense.
Code Geass was silly and over-the-top too, but at least that series knew how to do TWEESTS right. I sure as hell don’t care any more and just want it to end. However, you can’t just cram twist after twist into one episode or two and expect the viewer to still be following what’s going on, or even caring. I think the problem is that the show spent too long dicking around not explaining anything and so a whole bunch of shit was thrown together at the last minute in the hope of providing satisfactory explanations.
These last episodes have basically been explaining all the stuff that went down in the past, and quite frankly, most of it either makes no sense or is too convoluted to wrap my head round. Looks like we’re back to Aquarion EVOL being disappointing, but now we have ham-fisted explanations and Deus Ex Machinas.
No wonder people pirate visual novels.Īlso, due to the order that things aired, I’m just going to summarise what’s left. I paid the same for Koihime Musou and one playthrough of that was longer than all of Dengeki Stryker combined. It was only 15 hours long, and that was including the 5 hour beginning route focusing on Haruna. Being a short visual novel certainly took away enjoyment too. Whether it was a bad visual novel or not is something I’d have to give more thought to, but my own hype probably killed some of the enjoyment since I was expecting too much from it. I was really looking forward to it, which is surprising for me, since I’m not a fan of Overdrive’s works. I finished Dengeki Stryker on the day of release, which was last Friday.