Two more shows complete to review, as most of everything wraps up next week before we switch into the Fall season.
If we’re talking the best show of the season, excluding those which carried over from last season like Hanasaku Iroha and Steins;Gate, Kamisama no Memo-chou is by far in first place. The entire series from start to finish was fantastic in many ways, but especially the final episodes, easily the series best episodes to watch. The thing is, my expectations for this show going into it was that it was going to be almost like GOSICK and Jigoku Shoujo in the way Alice was presented in the first episode, but instead they really weaved a much more complicated basket out of her and the other main characters, in fact they didn’t waste much time on any one character or let them fall off without highlighting their importance to the end game. The mini-arcs themselves were well thought out and played, and when it came down to the “Angel Fix” arc, which was highlighted in the show’s early synopsis, they tied everything together into it to show just who Alice was and how important Narumi was to the overall story. There were a few unneeded kinks in the armor, and I would have liked to have just five more minutes at the end with Ayaka, but it opens the door for more possibly down the road, so I am satisfied with what I got.
Title: Kamisama no Memo-chou
Sub Group I Watched: gg, EveTaku, UTW
Episodes: 12 (including an hour-long two part first episode)
Rating (1-10): 9
Favorite Character: Narumi
Least Favorite Character: Toshi
SHIPPING BOX: Narumi and Ayaka
Favorite Arc: The Hirasawa Group arc, Narumi showed some true guts there
Alice’s Speech about NEETs: Being someone who is probably three clicks from that lifestyle, I have to say it is pretty rough. The rules are different for people like us, we cannot simply wake up one day and decide we’re normal people who drink beer with our buddies at the pub and watch football on Sundays. There is an entirely different mentality to being who we are, and stereotypes suck, I’ve been on the butt end of them all my life, which is why I am hipster about geeks and nerds in 2011 because after social networking’s rise, it’s now cool to be into computers and technology and kids don’t know what it was like to be made fun of oldschool a decade and more ago. I’ll always maintain if I grew up in these years, I’d be a lot more socially adjusted.
Ikoku Meiro no Croise was a lighthearted and fun series about a Japanese girl living in Paris of yesteryear, and it really was a cheerful show to watch. It wasn’t flashy, and it wasn’t meant to capture ratings really, but cute-as-buttons Yune made it worth watching all of it. Much like Usagi Drop, it really focused on the simple task of telling the story of Yune’s adventures in Paris with Claude and Oscar, and it did it quite well. Alice’s intervention did speed things up a bit from time to time, but she represented just as much curiosity in the new and unknown as Yune did in her daily life living in Paris. I felt like they told two stories, the world through Yune’s eyes, and the world through Yune’s eyes through Alice’s eyes. It’s a show definitely worth a watch, though not much changes between episodes, so if you bore easily from repetitious episodes, which this series does suffer from somewhat, then try something else. But you can’t go wrong with that Yune face.
Title: Ikoku Meiro no Croise
Sub Group I Watched: Ayako, IB
Episodes: 12
Rating (1-10): 8
Favorite Character: Yune
Least Favorite Character: Camille Blanche
Why not Claude? As much as I thought Claude was a dick a lot towards Yune, Camille just had that smugsnake expression on her always like she was better than everyone, and Claude at least knew he was being too hard on her often.
Implications: I’m never sure if animators in Japan are making hints sometimes in anime as to how they perceive other countries. It’s no secret no one likes America like Jeremy Clarkson makes fast-food sat-nav jokes on old episodes of Top Gear, but their view of Japan as told from Claude’s mouth does seem a bit inflated, though I suppose someone more familiar with French society a hundred years ago might be able to confirm?
A Second Season in Japan? I’d be interested in that, especially if it was Alice going to Japan with Yune. Though rich a Parisian girl in Japan would be a little… interesting.
Other shows that have ended this season are Yuru Yuri, Sacred Seven and Loli Jam which I am slowly getting through, reviews for those sometime this week. The final episodes of Hanasaku Iroha and Nichijou are tomorrow though, so expect that and this week’s chart then.
