Category: Finished Series: Slice of Life/Drama

Natsume Yuujin-Chou – 21

by psgels, posted in Natsume Yuujin-Chou



Short Synopsis: Natsume and his two classmates pay a visit to an old inn.
Episode Rating: 7,5/10 (Good)
Yeah, now I’m sure: this series SO needs a third season. What this series needs now more than anything is some sort of continuing story, and according to the manga readers, that indeed is about to appear, though there’s no way that the creators are going to fit that in only five more episodes. Let’s hope that the higher-ups of Brains Base feel the same way. ^^;

In any case, this episode was a great way to flesh out Natsume’s classmates a bit more, as they invite Natsume to an inn in order to spend some quality time on their homework (read: goof off). The second half of the episode deals with the story an old woman who in her childhood used the blood of a mermaid to save a friend she looked up to a lot.

Most of the episode was about both the woman and the mermaid coming to terms as to what they had done, so that both of them could receive proper closure. A standard story for this series, but it’s still a really charming story.

Michiko e Hatchin – 18

by psgels, posted in Michiko e Hatchin



Short Synopsis: Hatchin goes after a TV-star who looks like Hiroshi.
Episode Rating: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
Haha, as if Hatchin hadn’t already proven her awesomeness! In this episode, she manages to break into the house of a famous TV-star, breaking his window in the process because she thought he had something to do with Hiroshi. The episode was a bit hard to understand (Kansai-ben in Brazil?! What the…?), but if I understood correctly then this guy was scouted along with Hiroshi, but then Hiroshi left again. At this point, I’m really not sure what’s up with the guy: on one hand he’s running away all the time, but on the other hand he does find the time to appear on TV and in the newspaper, and yet at the same time he takes on a small job as a truck driver. Is this really the same guy?

And on a completely different note: Hatchin’s outfit in this episode rocked! Not only did it look even more awesome than usual, but for the first time she’s not afraid to hide the tattoo on her belly, even though we’ve only seen it like what… one time before? I must say that she gets more adorable with every single episode: her big motive in this episode for finding Hiroshi isn’t for her to find her own father, but instead she wanted to see Michiko’s smile back, who finally showed some signs of happiness when Hiroshi finally seemed within her reach (including a very strange blood-nose). That’s just too damn cute.

At this point, I’m pretty sure of my top 3 shows from the past Fall Season: 1) Mouryou no Hako, 2) Casshern, 3) Michiko e Hatchin. While these three are without a doubt my favourites of the shows that started airing in that season, their order is still debatable, depending on how they chose to end themselves. Michiko e Hatchin has pretty much labelled me as a Manglobe fan, and along with Bee-Train, they’re the only studio of which I’m pretty much guaranteed to blog every one of their TV-Series that come out. I so hope that this series is going to be more than 22 episodes. Not because the finale isn’t going to fit there (it’s actually the perfect length for such a series), but I just don’t want the goodness of this series to end. This show could ave gone on for twenty more episodes if it wanted to without ever getting dull.

Natsume Yuujin-Chou – 20

by psgels, posted in Natsume Yuujin-Chou



Short Synopsis: Natsume loses something as he and Taki try to get rid of the evil youkai.
Episode Rating: 7,5/10 (Good)
Ah, another adorable episode. It’s a good thing that Taki seems to be a recurring character, because there’s still so much potential left in her even though her story already took up two episodes. I’m especially hoping for a bit more romance (which really doesn’t happen often). It’s going to be interesting how she’s planning to make up for the time she lost, and spent without any friends whatsoever.

I was surprised when it turned out that the youkai had no intention to keep its promises. You don’t usually see that: most of them act very much according to a pattern, and promises are usually very important to them, but I guess that the malicious ones are different from that.

Now that the first half of the second season is over, I do have to say that I still like the series, but it does seem to be missing something when compared to the first season. I just can’t exactly put my finger onto what that is. Of course, the Tama-chapters and some others were awesome, but I don’t know… I just can’t call the second season on the same level of goodness as the first season…

Michiko e Hatchin – 17

by psgels, posted in Michiko e Hatchin



Short Synopsis: Michiko screws up while trying to get some passports and Hatchin meets a bunch of weirdos.
Episode Rating: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
Awesome to see that both installments of Michiko e Hatchin hit the mark exactly this week. This episode combines the dark parts of the Michiko-stories with the adorable parts of the Hatchin-story-lines. So what does that mean? A bunch of cross-dressers, of course!

Hatchin, while lost and searching for Michiko (who got herself into trouble yet again (nice restaurant, by the way: every table had a live canary on it) meets a guy who is willing to offer her a place to stay. He turns out to have a very kind daughter, and at first there seems nothing wrong with them… until it becomes clear that the guy is a stage cross-dresser performer, and his “daughter” is actually an ill-mannered boy. It was just adorable to see how much this boy looked up to his father: he behaved like an angel in front of him, and when he was alone with Hatchin he just kept bragging about how good and awesome his father was (which in a way was true: at the end of the episode he managed to get Michiko out of a tight spot while placing his life on the line for her).

I also like the subtlety in which some of the more negative sides of Brazil were highlighted, with the mother who simply used her baby as a beggar in order to get some money. I like how it got its point across without being overly preachy or moralistic about it.

We also see the guy with the weird hairdo back in this episode, and he’s shaping up to be not just a threat to Michiko, but Satoshi as well, making friends with the guys who caused Michiko problems in this episode. Since the creators didn’t use them at all in this episode, my guess would be that they’re going to play a major part in this episode. And in that aspect, I think that this series beats Samurai Champloo. while the action is less stylized, in SC the major antagonists really came from out of nowhere at the last possible moment, while here they appear every once in a while too do something.

Also, Michiko has a very strange sense of Rock Paper Scissors… And was it me, or was this episode obsessed with food? Seriously, the most detailed shots came from the various dishes that passed the screen…

Michiko e Hatchin – 16

by psgels, posted in Michiko e Hatchin



Short Synopsis: Michiko and Hatchin run into the woman who appeared with Hiroshi in the paper (Elis Michaela).
Episode Rating: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
This post is going to be short, since I’m hungry for that next episode, but I do want to say: Michiko Rocks! It’s always fun when her character clashes with that of another one. While this is usually Hatchin, this episode showed that the formula also works with others. The bitchfight between her and Elis was downright awesome (not to mention that kiss. ^^;).

And man, that Hiroshi is one bastard, who seems to be systematically on the run for either Michiko or Hatchin. He probably also faked his own death because of that, though it makes you wonder why he became stupid enough to be featured in a newspaper article. Did he do that because he fell in love with Elis?

Natsume Yuujin-Chou – 19

by psgels, posted in Natsume Yuujin-Chou



Short Synopsis: Natsume finds out that there’s a strange girl who doesn’t speak in his school.
Episode Rating: 7,5/10 (Good)
Oh, how rare: this arc is going to take two episodes. It sure is a haunting one: we have this girl who experimented with the occult, and in return once encountered an evil youkai. It wanted to play a little game with her: within the next 360 days, if she could catch it, it’d be her win, though if she’d fail to catch it, the youkai would not just eat her, but also everyone whose name she called. This forced her to spend the next year without talking to anyone, out of the fear that she’d accidentally call their names. That must be hell!

And it again shows how important names are for these youkai, and how screwed Natsume must have been if he didn’t meet Nyanko-sensei: what would he have done if he met that evil youkai instead? It would probably have eaten him immediately (speaking of which: nasty cliffhanger at the end. We know that Natsume isn’t exactly “eaten”, but I have really no idea what that youkai is planning to do with him).

An annoyance in this episode came from Natsume’s friends… I really expected better of these guys, but in one episode they were simply degraded into the stereotypical paper bags of the best friends of the lead character that you see in every anime. It’s all there: trying to hit on a random cute girl, and successively getting sad and angry when the lead character walks away with her. That’s really one trope that needs to stop.

Michiko e Hatchin – 15

by psgels, posted in Michiko e Hatchin



Short Synopsis: Hatchin meets a boy of her age at a local bookstore.
Episode Rating: 8/10 (Excellent)
It’s the episodes like this one that make this series so deceptive. One episode tells a cute love story between a bunch of kids, and yet the next one can focus on the incredibly dark Michiko-storyline. This really is a very varied show. Perhaps not the most balanced one, but you’ll never know what you’re going to get with every episode.

This episode definitely focused on the cute side of this show. while Hatchin’s stories generally lack a part in the overall storyline of this series, her character more than makes up for it. In this episode she also for the first time gets to find out what it means to have a crush on someone, ,though she more shies away from it. Especially the final shot of this episode made some impact. You could see that Michiko felt Hatchin’s sadness because it didn’t work out with the boy, and yet it was done with some great subtlety so that it didn’t turn out into an endless angst-fest.

And some more random comments: nice Ergo Proxy-reference with Vincent Law the author (he seems to have written quite a few books, they were really all over the bookstore ^^;). This episode also showed that it’s got a very talented musical producer: the background music never really stood out, but it was very varied and subtle, and overall it added really well to the different scenes.

Oh, and in this episode something finally happened that made Michiko and Hatchin sound like mother and daughter: Michiko wanted to have something, (a book in this case), and asked Michiko for permission to get it. That was definitely the sign (even more than the hug at the end of this episode) that they’re growing closer together. Oh, and next week should prove to be fun: another double-episode. Woo!

Natsume Yuujin-Chou – 18

by psgels, posted in Natsume Yuujin-Chou



Short Synopsis: Natsume gets visited by yet another sickeningly cute youkai who requests his name back.
Episode Rating: 8/10 (Excellent)
So, this was supposed to be another anime original episode, eh? I love how the fillers in this series actually make the story even better. This wasn’t simply yet another story inserted to fill time, this episode was introduced with a very specific purpose.

The thing with the Natsume Yuujinchou Manga is that it may have excellent stories, but they’ve got one major weakness: there’s not much overlap between them. The overall characters apart from Nyanko and Natsume appear very rarely. While this worked with Mushishi, Natsume Yuujinchou’s characters are of the type that make you hungry for more, and that’s exactly what this episode did. Finally we see Natsume hanging out with his friends from school. Finally we see Kaname again, finally we see how Natsume’s bond with him and his other friends has grown, and FINALLY we get some more background on Reiko. It really was about time for her character to get more fleshed out, and this episode did a wonderful job at it.

As it turns out, Reiko was incredibly different, and yet incredibly similar to Natsume. She too loved helping random Youkai, though her methods were more aimed at the psychology of the youkai: she’d do strange things of taking away their names, in order for them to achieve happiness in the long term. That’s probably also why she left her Yuujinchou to Natsume, though I’m not sure whether she planned it that way, or simply she wanted him to finish what she started.

Michiko e Hatchin – 14

by psgels, posted in Michiko e Hatchin



Short Synopsis: Satoshi sends a bunch of hit-men after Michiko.
Episode Rating: 8/10 (Excellent)
The best moments in this episode were definitely the ones involving Satoshi. Really, the guy is one of the best villains I’ve seen in a while; he just screams “charisma”, even though we hardly know anything about him. You know this guy is dangerous, and surrounded by a cast of awesome characters as in this series, I can’t wait to see the guy fully back in action again.

The rest of this episode was typical Manglobe. Their series really have a tendency to include a game element at non-filler points, even though these seem quite illogical at the time, and especially Ergo Proxy loved pulling them. This the second episode of Michiko e Hatchin in which Michiko’s enemies start playing a cat and mouse game with their victims, and I must say that they’re just as fun, and much more balanced than the ones in Ergo Proxy, which lost track of its plot a bit as it went along.

Satoshi this time hires two assassins: one of them is a drug addict at the end of his road, who desperately needs the money in order to get back to his girlfriend, and the other is a once awesome assassin who now is retired. Apparently, he’s good buddies with Satoshi, so he agreed to lend out his skills again, though the guy does make use of the opportunity to play a little game with his opponent. This all goes well until the other assassin rages into Michiko, apparently having heard her location from Satoshi who heard her location from the old guy.

Natsume Yuujin-Chou – 17

by psgels, posted in Natsume Yuujin-Chou



Short Synopsis: Natsume takes care of a strange kind of egg he finds in his garden.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
just when I thought that this series couldn’t get any more adorable after the fox-kid. This episode showed me that the creators have not lost their touch, like I originally feared, and they could actually surpass the first season one of these days.

This episode shows how Natsume takes care of an egg he finds in a nest in his garden, after the mother abandoned it. It probably was because the mother couldn’t see the egg, and therefore Natsume decides to take care of it, and eventually it hatches the cutest little youkai you could imagine. this episode was really good in displaying the strange mother-child relationship (and in Nyanko-sensei’s case it would probably be something like an uncle-child relationship) with this youkai, which they later name Tama.

And since this is a show about Youkai, the ending is a bit different from what happens in nature. When the time comes from Tama (a bird Youkai, after all) to spread his (her? After the fox-kid I’m not sure anymore) wings, s/he simply refuses to eat in order to avoid saying goodbye to Natsume, who did so many kind things to her.

One thing where the first and two seasons sort-of differ from each other is Nyanko-sensei: his banter is much more extreme than what it was in the first season, and he wasn’t exactly tight-lipped in the first season either. I guess it’s his way of warming up to living with Natsume (either that, or the writers are getting more confident and creative :P).