One thing that I’ve noticed about a lot of Mari Okada’s anime original scripts: the one thing she has trouble with is being interesting while building up. Especially in the first halves of her longer series have these flashes of brilliance intermixed with dull slice of life. Take Hana-Saku Iroha’s long wring of random episodes, Aquarion’s boring romantic set-up in its first half, or even Kuroshitsuji II’s first four episodes that were nothing but random hi-jinks. We too are now on that point for AKB0048 unfortunately, but the end of this episode did remember to actually deliver.
And it did so with some very weird succession rules that showed even more what a strange organization this AKB0048 is. So everyone is set to become a succeeding member of one of the founding members of the AKB, and who gets to succeeds is decided by strange flying blobs based on very vague criteria, they are ruled by a strange shadowy figure who writes unnerving lyrics. And also: we’ve seen people talk plenty of times in this series about “graduating”, however nobody has actually explained what that entails to.
Rating: * (Good)
There was so much trolling going on in this episode of Aquarion. Where to start: Amata was consciously abandoned by his parents, causing him to have a bad childhood, Ah, and you finally see them again? Too bad! Seriously, can’t we ever make these people survive and have them take responsibility for what they did? Shoji Kawamori was all over this episode, but the most apparent really was the ending, in which the main source of the conflict turns out to e environmental destruction. I already found it strange that there was so little of that in this series.
It made for a very fun episode though, and I definitely enjoyed it. It’s definitely nice to have such over the top plot twists combined with interesting characters here. They’re not all interesting of course: Mikono YET AGAIN did absolutely nothing, but Zessica and Mikage have really grown on me, Kagura really got his time to shine here, and even Amata has gotten interesting to watch now that we’ve delved into his back-story.
Also, now that we’re near the end of the first half of 2012, I think I can say this confidently: Aquarion has the best soundtrack of the year so far. Yeah okay it was copied from the first Aquarion and all, but still: it blows all of the other soundtracks this year simply out of the water due to its massive size, sheer versatility and consistent epic tone.
Rating: ** (Excellent)
It wasn’t all copied though. They recently released the Soundtrack and it had 22 fresh beautiful tracks on it. And you have to admit, it’s sad when perfectly good soundtracks only ever get used used once, even more so if the anime they’re featured in is mediocre.
And we only have about 2-3 episodes left, even if his parents survived it’s not like they’d have had time to ‘take responsibility’.
From speculation, the Wings of the Sun is what keeps balance in the world. Since the Wins of the Sun has been moved to Altair, the planet has started to recover. Now in Vega everything has gone to hell and will probably end up like Altair did in the past.
Wow…I couldn’t disagree anymore this episode was terrible. For you to write off bad writing as trolling is just stupid
you want a cookie?
Was there a point to your comment or are you just failing at being funny?
Want a cupcake instead or do you want a Yordle snaptrap?
10 bucks says “graduation” means they die in action. Though I think it would be kind of cool if there was some sort of higher level of AKB that is even more over the top or something.
This isn’t Bleach. There’s no “squad zero”.
Kids Nextdoor was actually what came to mind when writing that comment, but that’s a good example too. 😡
Your example is positive, mine is negative 🙂
Yeah, now that I think about it doesn’t make a lick of sense. (it didn’t in bleach either) So I stick by my initial assessment.
“Mikono YET AGAIN did absolutely nothing.”
It’s build up. 6 months of build up for the 5 very last minutes of the show.
If this episode was excellent any other show has to be a timeless masterpiece this week.