Okay, so it indeed doesn’t look like this series is going for a School Days ending, but at this point, I honestly don’t care anymore. This episode was so emotionally moving, and the second season of White Album has just gotten better with every passing episode. At this point, I’m even sad that there’s only one episode left. I want more, dammit.
The dialogue in this episode was exceptionally well written. The way it carefully wrapped up, developed and progressed all of the different storylines in this series was really well done. Rina seems to have just lost her voice, but I really liked the subtlety with which she ended up dealing with it. In fact, the frail Yuki overreacted more than she did.
In the meantime, this episode also wrapped up Yayoi’s story, surprisingly. It had it coming, because she has been screwing and kissing Touya surprisingly little lately, and I really applaud the creators for letting it resolve itself very slowly, rather than just devoting an entire arc to her and wrap up everything that is about her in that arc.
I’m also really surprised at how much extra depth Mana and Menou’s mother has gotten through the past few episodes. She really seemed like your average uncaring mother, but the final quarter of this series made her a much more important character. Seriously though, at this pace White Album is well on its way to bombard itself into my top 3 favourite hentai game adaptations, along with Air and True Tears. The first season indeed drove me insane with the way it so annoyingly screwed up its potential, but for some reason the new director (yeah, apparently the first and second season have different directors) really changed the way this series worked, and instead of going for the cheap drama shots that the first season was full off, he continued the story with much more natural plot twists and developments.
Really, I think that if the director of the first season would have handled the second one as well, we indeed would have gotten this School Days ending. Under his guidance, everything probably would have gone to hell by now. I think that that’s also really nicely symbolized by that episode in which Touya buys himself his answering machine: it’s the new director’s way of saying: let’s develop the characters through their interactions, instead of these cheap plot twists.
Rating: ** (Excellent)
the 2nd half was much better than the 1st but we still had too little time to deal with our suppposed main love triangle Yuki-Touya-Rina. WIth 1 episode left I hope they don’t leave it open, that would just make this entire anime a promo for the PS3 game.
True Tears and White Album have something in common
The anime version is not a retelling, but rather a total re-imagining
It’s really a different story altogether
Wow sounds like an emotionally strong episode, can’t wait to watch it!