Okay, I admit. This episode was pretty much fun to watch. The plot still is one big failure and mish-mash of clichés, but I don’t think anyone cares at this point about whether or not Dan is going to succeed in saving the world.
For an episode with such a cheesy premise, I really enjoyed this episode much more than I thought I would. In any other anime, an episode in which the male lead finds out that his love interest has had her mind wiped, and manages to get her memory back through the power of love, it would have been an incredibly cliché bore-fest. But with Basquash, in the end I couldn’t really expect anything else. The same goes for the climax of this episode in which the creators try to be smart and seemingly “kill off” Dan. Sorry Kawamori, but after Macross Frontier I’m not buying that anymore.
And granted, it seemed to have been the entire plan of the bad guys to have Dan come, play Basquash with Rouge and then trigger the events for the apocalypse, or whatever is similar to that, so I guess that this show is excused at this point. In any case, this episode finally had another fun basketball match again, and in combination with the concert, it delivered for me. It’s also good to see this series briefly return to its themes on fandom, which is something I remember praising this series for before it jumped the shark and somehow completely abandoned these themes.
Just one thing: something really weird is going to happen for me to blog Kawamori’s next series…
Rating: * (Good)]]>
Basquash! – 22
The thing about this show is that it has to have all those cliches because it is a show about fandom and entertainment, and while the premise, like everything else about the show, is ridiculously over-the-top, it is also one of the most unique premises I’ve seen in anime. Basketball-playing-mechas that look like cars on legs and save the world by emulating the sports that the gods played to create the universe…also, the cool thing about the cliches is that they somehow always do it in an original way, yes, rouge had her memories wiped and brought back by the power of love, but not the power of her love for dan, it was actually the power of her love for basquash that allowed her to remember her love for dan…anyways, I wish they’d never changed the staff around on this show, because the original crew did bring a sense of realism in the way the characters lived and breathed within this world that is so totally unreal, and it made suspension of disbelief a little easier, but, that doesn’t discount the fact that a whole lot of what made this an amazing series isn’t still amazing. I will say this, I’m always held captive through every episode, and I always end the episode with a good feeling in my chest and a smile on my face.