A small household note: upcoming Friday, Saturday and Sunday I’ll be completely busy, both due to real life appointments, and two certain posts that take up a lot of time to fully write, so I won’t have the time to blog shows as Usagi Drop and Dantalian no Shoka even if I wanted to, so again I’ll mostly cover the series that air early in the week or some of the stuff that I couldn’t watch on Sundays. Apologies for picking these shows a bit repetitively.
Gyakkyou Burai Kaiji – 45
Now, to be honest I did find the method for beating the pinchers a bit far-fetched. It assumed that there were no spare parts, that Kaiji could get his hands on some custom pinchers within a very tight time-limit, that they’d fail right at the exact moment, and that nobody noticed anything about the strange weight distribution of those things (hiding a chemical bomb in them is bound to feel differently from usual wood). Tilting the entire building with 20 tons of water though, was just awesome. It’s deceptively simple and yet completely unintuitive. Although I do wonder what Kaiji meant with that they wouldn’t be found out on the daily level check on the roulettes? I mean, if a level check was used, wouldn’t it reveal his entire plan? The device that they showed is meant to check whether something is level, not whether something tilts very fast. Unless of course a gimmick of the casino is that ALL of the roulettes are tilted… Also, I’m still baffled with that there are still at least five episodes left. The pacing so far has been pretty much what I expected, and yet they’re still nowhere near done yet?
Rating: ** (Excellent; gets promoted to Awesome as soon as I can find a good explanation against the level checks)
Kamisama Dolls – 06
Okay, so aside from that really out of place fanservice scene, this was a really good episode. There’s quite a bit of character development, the sibling subplot is turning out quite interesting, now that Utao wants to make up with her twin brother. There was a ton of background in this episode, the creators explained how the flying dolls work, we got to see the families of the lead characters, and overall the characters and the setting got a nice amount of depth. The series is halfway over, and you still could have fooled me with that it’s going to wrap itself up within six episodes. So far we’ve got a well told series that alternates between comedy, action and drama really well with only the fanservice feeling out of place. The lead character is bland at first, yet he does have some interesting flaws to his character. Everyone’s well acted, it’s funny, and it knows how to build up. Now it’s up to the second half to use this. And solve the problem of having an ongoing manga…
Rating: ** (Excellent)
Nurarihyon no Mago – 31
This episode introduced all kinds of potentially interesting characters. Too bad that they’re just used for a training arc. So far, I’m not really that impressed by it. Nura learned the technique a little too easily, but most importantly there doesn’t really seem to be much depth to his technique. Overall, Nura’s reason to go to Kyoto seems kinda weak at the moment: his classmates suggested to go to Kyoto and then he suddenly remembered that the killer of his father lives there. I do hope that this will grow into more than just a simple tale of revenge. Nurarihyon kicked ass, though.
Rating: (Enjoyable)
Sacred Seven – 06
Ack, it’s a shame that this will only be a 1-cour series. That pretty much changes everything. Of course there is the slight possibility that the creators have a second season planned, but I’ve seen too many series that promised the same thing to really be able to buy that. Because of that, we’re already halfway through the series… so what has it accomplished? Is it building up to an interesting plot? No, Knight is a very boring and emo villain. Its atmosphere? Nope, that also seems rather random and disjointed, more aimed at silly comic relief than consistency. Characters? They’re still emo, their acting is still flat, and in this episode Ruri went pretty far out of character in the quiet scenes. Setting? It’s a school and people have superpowers: nothing really interesting. In the end I can only praise this show for its action scenes: those are really good, and this episode was no exception. The solution?? Why didn’t you just make a 6-episode OVA with a compilation of the best action scenes?
Rating: (Enjoyable)
wow…its only gonna be a 1 cour…
you should drop this and pick up a good manga series *cough*shingeki no kyoijin*cough*
@Carbuncle MIchales Jackson elliot
Smooth move there man. Not obvious at all….
While shingeki no kyoijin is a good manga, if you try to get people to read it like that it will only serve to get them to put it off.
Seeing those well done action scenes in Sacred Seven only serves to depress me. Those poor animators that put such hard work into such a stupid storyline….
Yeah great work on the visuals, I’m quite surprised it wasn’t designed with a better plot and to be longer as I thought it was going to be Sunrise next “big” show with how they seemed to be promoting it.
@Aidan Not my problem if people get offended if people don’t want to read it becuase they are “offended” too bad. Not my problem.
Anyway, wanted to say that the characters in the training arc do become an important part of the story
@Carbuncle MIchales Jackson elliot
You missed the point.
So… It seems that apart from the director there was another reason why the second season of Nurarihyon is better.
The original Nurarihyon is a much more interesting character than his grandson.
At least with the training arc we can hopefully get rid of his classmates for a while, right?
the biggest flaw of Nurarihyon since the first season [wich I stopped watching after 8,9 episodes] is for sure the SCHOOL kids… they’re just boring, non-funny, useless to thye story…
and yes, the old Nurarihyon kicks the grandson’s ass easily… it’s way more interesting and strong as a character
I don’t think Rikuo actually learned a technique in this episode. He already knows how to use fear, since it probably comes instinctively to him in his yokai form. What he didn’t know, and still doesn’t as of this episode, is how to cut through fear (a combat technique specifically intended for yokai vs. yokai) – which is what the other yokai plan to teach him.
If anything, the way they presented it was a bit confusing, though.
[SPOILER ALERT]Please do not count your chicks before they hatch. Some of the characters in the training arc will join the Nura clan in the fight in Kyoto. Rikuo’s reason of going to Kyoto is because Hagorogo Gitsune killed Nura Rihan (his dad)
The best thing about Kamisama Dolls is still the OP (which is the best of the season and probably 2011 overall)
Seems kinda wasted in that… Its watchable, but I have a lot of problems with it, especially the characters… I dont like the fact the main character is a brat with powers, and the “girlfriend” of the main guy is only there for the fanservice, as proven by her unnecessary G cups
In a way it Sacred Seven and Kamisama Dolls have a lot in common, they both fail to make use of the ideas they have, and instead indulge in generic crap we have already seen a thousand times before… Oh well, still better than Blood C LOL
Albeit they didn’t explain it that well, the point with the level-check is that the casino performs it once a day at a given time. Kaiji spent days within the casino, so he surely noticed.
So they had to start filling the water cubes the day before right after the level-check, spend 8 hours to fill all 20 cubes, then wait some more hours for the building to tilt, and then finally start playing and hopefully winning before they performed the level-check for that day.
It also explains why Kaiji started playing at such a weird time – I mean, since the plan partially relied on the presence of an audience to force Ichijo to keep going, why not showing up during prime time in the evening when there’s more people in the casino? Well the point is that they couldn’t – Ichijo would have realized that the building was tilted from the level-check. Fridge brilliance at its best :).
Yeah, they didn’t explain it really well but it goes like this : The Casino does checks *daily* and they need 8 hours to fill all the containers. So they started doing it around the time the last check was supposed to happen.
Steelman, Puran: ah, interesting. I first thought that the reason they waited for the last possible moment was to wait for the building to tilt as much as possible. Instead, that building just sank in just those eight hours.
@Regarding the pinchers:
The plan didn’t assume there arn’t spare parts; Kaiji’s modified pinchers are indistinguishable from the original, therefore there is no need to change them. What’s more it dosen’t really matter if there were spares since Kaiji’s group could just get rid of them.
Kaiji obviously didn’t plan for the pinchers to melt right when he needed them too which is why he spent the last two episodes showering balls hoping something would happen. It’s been a long time since I’ve read the manga or seen the anime but if I remember correctly, kaiji only has about 5 playing cards, and he already wasted 2 and a half just on breaking the pinchers. (The manga even makes a special mention on how he wasted too many balls then he planned to.)
Also Kaiji’s anticipation for it not to take a long time is kind of reasonable. I mean thinking about it, it’s strange the heat-pack hasn’t exploded during his first card… I mean how hard can it be for spikey iron ball to cut open a peace of paper?!
As for getting the part, at least in the manga it’s explained Kaiji especially made it out of gum. (yeah even I don’t get why it looks so much like the original…)
As for the weight of the pinchers… Come on man all it is is a gum with a heat pack, a small ball and a spring. it’s still light enough to not cause a scene.
Someone else explained the roulette idea so I will go ahead and explain about the flippers.
The flippers are actually a known element, as Kaiji explained. Kaiji says I literally (“the fixing type of maintenance and manufacturing of the bog is out of the casinos hands”). In fact Sakazaki knows who made the actual bog and had a replica made for him, remember?
It would only take a clever deal to tap their phone line (of the place that makes the parts, not the casino lines which would be harder), offer repairs, and Walah. Ichijou is not a mechanic or electronically inclined and nor are any of the other guys.
The only danger to this plan (sort of) is the existence of spare floppers but Kaiji still felt like they would hire a maintenance guy from the same firm that was hired to design the big. It keeps things simple that way. And simple it was 🙂