Tamaya!
*erhem* sorry, but I couldn’t resist. This episode had so many Ooedo Rocket-vibes. Heck, you could nearly say that this is Ooedo Rocket, condensed into just one episode, with the samurais removed, it’s almost scary to see how many similarities there are. And still it doesn’t feel like one of the two ripped off the other.
Seeing as I loved Ooedo Rocket, there’s no surprise that this was probably my favourite FREEDOM episode up till now. This episode had everything: fun characters, a great storyline of trying to create the rocket, a bit of background on why Ao was the one on the picture that Takeru found (her father once tried to go to the moon as well, but he failed. Ao was forced to forget everything that happened, and so she started to get really involved in the local space program). Blue Earth was of course the Akai of Ooedo Rocket. In this case, he was supposed to go to the moon along with Ao’s father, but chickened out at the last moment.
One point of criticism: it hardly feels like two and a half year have passed by. Characters still look the same, which is especially suspicious since we’re dealing with a bunch of teenagers here. I really wonder whether Freedom can pull off a good finale. Heck, what kind of finale is it going for anyway? At any case, I do hope that the creators won’t go for something too epic, especially since Freedom has been so delightfully down-to-earth up till now.
This episode also reminded me of why I love Yoshihiro Ike’s soundtracks so much. To be honest, he’s my favourite musician, along with Yuki Kajiura. Yoko Kanno’s work is excellent, but in my opinion she’s not the best.
Cool, I wasn’t aware FREEDOM had a 6th ep, and just assumed the mini-series ended with episode 5 when they found Ao. Gonna have to check it out, and if it’s anything like O-Edo Rocket (a good show!), doubly so. Hopefully they won’t have anymore of those blatant Nissin Cup Noodle spots shoe-horned into the ep like they did with the earlier eps, bleh. Half expected the characters to freeze frame and shove the Cup Noodle into the viewer’s face each time they did.
The 7th episode of Freedom is out there already with the recent release of the Volume 7 DVD in Japan. It’s about 48 minutes in length (double length episode) and wraps up the story. Seen it? Yup. The ending? It goes for a very straightforward ending.