And this show too breaks the Kujou-syndrome. Finally, this episode gave the male lead some character. He may not be a detective, but this episode instead established him as a con-man, and certainly something other than an idiot who just holds the others back. Instead, his main flaw is that he’s physically weak, which is something that plenty of other characters have covered here. In other words: the main cast are all filling in for each others’ weaknesses, which is a very good thing to spice things up.
On top of that, the fanservice in this episode was a lot more subtle and actually didn’t feel out of place, plus the comic relief also got better and balanced. This may seem like small nitpicking, but when it was the main flaw of the first two episodes, it’s really great to see this improve as well.
Now, I did cringe when the male lead suddenly claimed that banks could easily be hacked and all, but thankfully they realized that such a thing was impossible. That’s also quite rare in series that feature hacking: generally those seem to believe that even potato chips can be hacked. . Now, this episode did not have the most interesting villains who on top of that were dumbed down in order to make them a) believe this b) fail to overtake a high school kid dragging another high school kid around and c) not taking a lot of security measures in case something went wrong. I can forgive this for the sake of variety, though, since the first episode did have interesting villains.
I can understand using Yakuza as a villain and all, since they’re pretty much one of the biggest criminal organizations in the world and all, but the problem is that they’re always portrayed very stereotypically. Kaiji is currently one of the few series who really made them an actual threat. This is not just criticism on this episode, but on anime in general.
This is just nit-picking, though. the dialogue is still among the best of the season, and once again this episode put a ton of new information about its characters in just these 20 minutes. For variety’s sake this episode also had much less Alice than usual, which also is good to spice things up and prevent one character from standing out too much. I’m surprised at how large the cast already is in this series, but I have to say that this is a great attempt at a series with a huge cast so far. The key is to give everyone enough time to show off, while at the same time not trying to make everyone equal a la Idolm@ster.
Rating: ** (Excellent)
I’m annoyed with how fragmented all the developments in this episode were carried out; it could have done with a better execution, but it was fine.
Narumi’s problem is that he’s the lifeless husk of a self-righteous shonen character with no obvious motive besides “Help them because I want to”….yeah. He’s no Touma, but that doesn’t mean he’s a strong character.
I keep seeing people criticize this show because Narumi can’t fly like Superman, or stretch like Luffy, or whatever. He’s just one character in a group. This isn’t the story of a super-powered tough guy. It’s a story about a group of characters. I don’t even see him as being weak, spineless, or generic, or any of the other complaints being hurled around.
If I were to criticize this episode, I would say the resolution was not clear — are they suggesting that, as soon as they PHYSICALLY got Meo’s dad back, everything was okay? Surely the Yakuza could continue to pursue them (including the ramen shop), so the ending was a bit lacking for me (or maybe I just missed something).