It’s strange. You would expect the episodes to turn darker as the series progresses, but so far, the episodes have become lighter. The bad guy also hasn’t shown imself in quite a while either. In any case, this is probably the lightest episode of Popolocrois 2003 yet. It was a bit awkward at times, as it mostly centered around Pinon, Luna and Marco having fun at a festival, though the conclusion was surprisingly touching.
The episode is centered around Marco. He and Leona are collecting a few strawberries in order to make some jam. When they get home, Leona realizes that she doesn’t have enough strawberries in order to make her jam, so she sends Marco out on an errand, to go to the city in order to buy some strawberries for her. At the same time, there’s a huge festival going on, which Pinon and Luna are, of course, attending.
Marco then meets up with the two of them, and basically ends up having so much fun that he spends the money, originally meant for the strawberries. The rest of the episode is spent with him, Pinon and Luna trying to earn enough money in order to buy the strawberries, or goldenberries, which seem to be even better than the strawberries. Three attempts are shown.
Attempt # 1: a Donut-Eating Contest. Pinon’s annoying classmates notify the threesome about a donut-eating contest. They’ll be attending themselves as well. As Marco loves to eat, he basically should be able to win the prize money. Still, another kid is the winner. I like the fact that the creators managed to choose the person you’d least expect to win.
Attempt # 2: imitating the Straw Millionare Story. The story goes as follows, we have a poor guy, who finds a piece of straw. He then manages to trade the straw for something better. He then kept doing this until he ended up as a millionare. In our case, it’s a pencil, which gets traded for a pair of sweets, which gets traded for a piece of cloth. I like the way that the creators didn’t make this extend to the obvious, as after they’ve found the cloth, Attempt # 2 gets cut off, in order to make place for Attempt # 3.
Attempt # 3: An egg-racing contest. Basically, you have a start and a finish, and whoever can get from the start to the finish in the shortest time, is the winner. The catch is that each contestant carries an egg, and you’re disqualified if the egg breaks. The grand prize is one gold coin, which is more than enough to buy the goldenberries, and plenty of other nice things. Still, there’s one problem. Pinon, Marco and Luna are basically the only contestants who aren’t big, strong guys. Therefore, they plan to win with the help of smart tricks, teamwork and the Seirei.
Marco first leads them through a shortcut, even though he does get lost a bit. Then, everyone’s supposed to travel by boat to a distant island, though Marco was smart enough to bring them to a shore without a beach. Instead, it has huge cliffs rising up the sea. Pinon then gets the idea of using some discarded wooden boxes and the piece of cloth from before to make a hot air ballon, driven by the two seirei. While this didn’t make sense at all, and this plan obviously wouldn’t work in real life, even with seirei, it does show Pinon’s insight. In any case, these factors make the threesome get the lead, only to end up getting tricked by Punpun and Kotaro who are looking for attention again. Their role is small, though they do make sure that Pinon, Marco and Luna end up last. The nice thing is that their attempts were appreciated by everyone, and they get a special prize for this: a basket full of goldenberries.
Even though these events were amusing to watch, it wasn’t what this episode was about. It’s about the tight bond between Marco and Leona, his mother. It was already known that Marco is very scared of the thought of getting his mother angry. He keeps telling himself that this is because she’ll punish him severely if he makes a mistake, though I think he’s trying to fool himself. During this episode, he tells Pinon and Luna that he likes eating so much because it makes Leona smile, and he likes to see her smile. I think he just tells himself that his mother will get extremely scared when he messes up, because he’s very afraid to make her sad.
Some interesting question also arose, regarding the characters while watching this episode. For example, Luna gets really angry when both Marco and Pinon complain about their parents. I think she’s trying to subtly say that they should be glad that they have parents. What exactly has happened to her own parents, if she says something like that? Did she run away from them, did they disappear, or did they even die? Also, why did Leona decide to live in the forest, instead of the town? She could have lots of reasons for this, most are just apparent. But what was the major factor for her to decide to stay there? And I’m still debating whether Shirokishi is Marco’s real father or not. I would guess that he actually is, as Leona seems to have a picture of him on the wall.
I also liked the good use of symbols, references and storywriting. For example, take the balloon. Marco gets it at the beginning of the episode, and it kindof tags along with the episode. When characters also run aound in high grass, it serves as a good way for the player to tell where they are at that moment, and in the end, it serves as inspiration in order to make the hot air balloon. Still, I think that it didn’t survive the episode. Poor balloon. Or the cloth, they aquired at Attempt # 2. At first, it’s forgotten about again, only until it serves as the balloon-part of the hot-air balloon. And the animals who appear at the beginning of the episode, and even the bushes full of strawberries. The fact that there are a huge number of them, suggests that Marco and Leona have been living very peacefully along with the forest.
Also, I like Narcia how she keeps annoying Pietoro. Pietoro has the habit that he only talks about the good things he did in his past. Narcia cleverly uses this when Pietoro gets annoyed with Pinon, and starts acting as a huge hypocrite. ^^
Still, I’m wondering what that bad guy is up to. He’s probably the seirei of darkness. Then there should be a seirei of light as well… In any case, the fact that he hasn’t shown himself must mean something. I’m also wondering when the water-seirei will arrive. Ah well, we know it will once it starts to rain like crazy.
Overall, a fairly light episode. A bit boring, but the way it ended was very touching. So what if most of the events didn’t make any sense at all? ^^
Memorable moment: Narcia’s sarcastic remarks. 😉
