Category: RD Sennou Chousashitsu

Short Synopsis: Okay, so last week’s preview was lying: this episode wasn’t about Souta and Holon at all. Instead, it’s about Minamo’s family.
Highlights: What could not be awesome about Minamo’s divided family coming back together?
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10
What a charming episode! Minamo and Souta’s parents and grandparents have always been vaguely mentioned here and there, but they never really took the central focus in this series, apart from perhaps that one episode that was dedicated to Souta’s father. In this episode, Minamo’s grandmother AND mother come to visit their offspring for one night, and enjoy a rare family reunion where all five members of the family are together.

I guess that this too is a commentary to today’s Japanese society, which through its workaholic attitude has many families that are separated from each other, and I can imagine that sixty years into the future, where transport has evolved even more, this wouldn’t be any different, and like Minamo’s parents, couples often live apart from each other because of their jobs.

And at the same time, this episode fleshed out Miamo and Souta even more, by showing what their parents look like. And damn, Minamo’s grandmother looks so different from what I expected. I can’t remember whether we actually saw a shot of her in the second episode, but I was really expecting some thin old lady with grey hair and all, and instead she turns out to be a much more similar to Minamo, and much younger-looking than I imagined her to be. At the same time, the creators also manage to sneak in a reference about Kushima having a sister. Am I the only one curious about her, and what she’d look like?

And damn, the preview for the next episode intrigues me. There’s some kind of deserted ruins in some jungle that suddenly started operating again. Could this go further on the Eliza-subplot of a few episodes back?

Short Synopsis: It’s back to action and fanservice as this episode focuses at Souta.
Highlights: But what great action it is.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10
The next episode previews are getting less and less helpful… they still give an indication of what’s to expect in the next episode, but they’re getting more and more cryptic with every episode. Still, that’s what I like about them. The reason why I don’t often look at these previews is that you’ll never know when they’re too spoilery for their own good. The worst offender that I ran into was Naruto, which once revealed the plot of an entire spoilerific episode in its preview. Still, RD knows exactly what it should give away, to keep its viewer wondering and not reveal any obvious spoilers. The preview for this episode, for example, considered of Souta and Holon fighting. And it was indeed an episode about Souta and Holon, but at the same time it also symbolized the romantic tension between the two, which was the main point about this episode. At the same time, the preview for the next episode features the entire same scene, with just Souta realizing why he keeps losing to Holon in training fights. It should be in the same vein as the current one, but we can only guess what it’ll really be about.

In any case, the current episode rocked. Souta, the guy who sleeps with the boss of his boss is actually secretly in love with Holon. This episode addresses the fact of falling in love with an android a bit differently than Chobits, though. This episode didn’t necessarily end with a happy ending, but rather with all the characters (except Minamo, perhaps) understanding what’s going on. There’s no cheesy confession scene, but instead a much more subtle approach was chosen.

There was one particular scene that caught my attention in this episode: it was where the evil android in this episode had just beaten Holon “unconscious” and threw her body away. That was the only time so far where Holon looked (and sounded) like an object, rather than a human being.

Short Synopsis: This episode is about food (no, really).
Highlights: Surprisingly dark, and at the same time Minamo’s antics were hilarious.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10
This episode returns to the essence of RD Sennou Chousashitsu: Minamo and how the Metal affects people’s consciousness. Now I also understand why the previous of the previous episode was nothing but food, because this time Haru was set out to rescue a number of food lovers who were lost in their own desires.

I must say that this series has such a fascinating understanding of human nature. These people basically were on the metal, 24/7, enjoying all kinds of delicious foods. Because their consciousnesses were uploaded to the metal, all the virtual food felt surprisingly real, but at the same time this was ruining their real bodies. They would become so used to the uber-delicious food that no food in real life would taste good anymore, and this episode, they became crazy over the taste of just ordinary water, simply because they hadn’t tasted it in so long.

This episode also showed cases where Souta had to take care of cases where people tried to stimulate their own senses so much that they simply died, which also nearly happened with the gentlemen (or at least, that’s what their avatars were at the time) in this episode. It’s a pretty freaky idea. Overall, the messages of this series have been light and optimistic, about a future where the limit to express your creativity knows no bounds, and at the same time it makes it seem so easy to lose yourself in this virtual world.

And Minamo was so adorable in this episode, with her fear of bell peppers (or at least, that’s what I think she meant). These characters can literally talk about food and still remain utterly enjoyable. Especially considering the entire first half of this episode was nothing other than Minamo, sulking over her fear of bell peppers, and the only thing that distracted me was a rather bad video file that kept glitching.

Short Synopsis: First half recap, second half the return of the scuba-diving brothers.
Highlights: Interesting art direction, but a recap remains a recap.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 6/10
So… yeah. Don’t look too much forward to this week’s episode of Real Drive, because the first half is basically Minamo, making a phone call with her grandmother and telling her about the things she did throughout the series. The second half features original content, but that neither is the most exciting, as the scuba diving brothers go scuba diving with Minamo, and teach her the basic principles. It was charming how Minamo now realized the world that captivated Haru, but throughout the episode, you could see that tons of cost-saving animation techniques were used: live action images, still shots, cameras away from faces, etc. It gives an interesting effect, but exciting is different. Although I do admit that Minamo looked surprisingly good in scuba-suit…

Also… what the heck was up with the next episode preview? All it showed was the different kinds of food that we’ve seen throughout the series…

Short synopsis: Haru and Minamo go on a date.
Highlights: Really, can RD get any more awesome than this?
Overall Enjoyment Value: 9/10

If you’re wondering why this entry is so fast, I’m experimenting this time with Horribleraws. I’ve used them as well on Ultraviolet’s first episode as well (great show, by the way), in order to see whether they’re really that horrible. Well, the video and audio-quality are indeed not that good, and the Japanese commercials are even more annoying than the things we have to endure on Dutch tv, but the speed of these guys is quite impressive. Heck, I remember how they released Kaiba, more than two days before any other source got hold of another version. Right now, their quality is pretty horrible, but it’s going to be interesting if they manage to improve their quality as time goes on…

In any case, enough off-topic, because this episode of Real Drive was just AWESOME, even though it goes into an entirely different direction from the rest of the series. Basically, like mentioned above, there is no case in this episode, and all that happens is that Haru tries to chase off a bee that parked itself on a sleeping Minamo’s nose (really hilarious) and the two of them going on a date afterwards, where Haru’s past gets revealed. The entire thing was basically one huge chunk of nostalgia, and the result was absolutely charming.

During said flashbacks, some entirely new background tunes started playing. As it turns out, Haru’s biggest inspiration to become a diver was a group of dolphins he used to play with as a child. Ever since, he’s been fascinated with them. This episode shows us exactly how he went from a casual diver to a professional one, and met Minamo’s grandmother and Kushima and started working with them. He turned out to be an expert in skin-diving, which is why he probably was used in order to retrieve the red stuff in episode one.

I could praise this episode to heavens, but this is really one of these episodes you need to see for yourself in order to understand its awesomeness. Let me just say that if this series is already this awesome at its 13th episode, the God knows what the creators have in store for the rest of this series…

Aww, such a charming episode this time. This one’s about Minamo again, and a blind girl who she meets at the beach. The girl turns out to be a former classmate of Minamo’s classmates, and she’s blind. This was an interesting episode to show how blind people have been dealing with the metal and all.

The dialogue writers were in their element again, so it was another one of those hard-to-understand episodes, but from what I managed to understand: the girl is a metal-artist. She’s used her imagination that she got from her blindness to create unique world, concepts and objects that people with vision would never think about, which is why she got a lot of fans. If I understood correctly, then this went out of hand a bit when one of her rivals caused her to go brain-down.

The next episode-preview was a really interesting one: all it showed was a shot of Haru and Minamo, relaxing. Nothing more. Due to the nature of these previews, and the fact that series usually seem to save something special for episode 13, I’m really looking forward to it, and something’s telling me that something major is going to happen to the two of them. And even if that doesn’t happen, the episode still will focus a lot on the two of them, which is good enough for me. 🙂

An episode about Kushima. Again, this episode is about the things people leave behind in their past, and at the same time it’s a great chance to get some more insight into his character. As it turns out, he used to be an excellent violinist when he was young, though he quit at a certain time.

I first thought that he quit due to the wound he received when he tried to stop Haru from plunging into the glowing red sea, but instead his decision to quit was a bit more complex. My lack of Japanese didn’t understand his exact reason, even with a dictionary, but it’s basically that he saw no reason to continue to improve his skills anymore. He already was at the top, and there was no practical use for his talents anymore. He lost his passion, so he quit.

Since this is probably the only anime apart from Milennium Actress with characters that age for more than fifty years and explores more than just “suffering”, it can really show us some interesting stuff. I have no idea when exactly Kushima quit playing the violin, but it’s likely to be around forty years ago. Not only is he still carrying around the things he did, but the people around him who admired his work also still carry those memories. In this episode, we meet a violinist who became great due to his urges to be accepted by the far superior Kushima, who already was very businesslike back then. Am I also right that he once was a girl, and then changed genders?

I’m looking forward to the next episode, as it seems to be going back to the supernatural roots of this series. That girl has me intrigued for some reason.

Yet again I notice that strange effect with this series, where every episode just feels like it’s just ten minutes long instead of the actual twenty. This episode goes back to the diving, as a computer with a highly advanced AI named Eliza is discovered on the bottom of the sea-floor, and it kidnaps Haru.

I’m not sure how to explain it, but this episode combined the first few episodes of this series, where Haru would dive and Minamo would guide him, with the mystery-roots of the following episodes, which were more focused at exploring one particular issue in the metal. Minamo this time ends up diving in the metal inside a special suit, to go after Haru, although you can see the disadvantages of not being “cyber-ified”, because her body is struggling heavily to get through it. This episode was both meant to strengthen the bond between Minamo and Haru and to show a bit more about the capabilities of AI.

The question also remains: why was Haru the only one whose consciousness was taken away, even though Eliza seemed to talk with many different people? This too can be related to the accident Haru had in the past. I’m looking forward to the next episode, because according to the preview, it’ll deal with Matsuda. I’ve been dying to see some background on the guy.

Whoa, such a difference from the previous episodes. This episode takes all the focus away from Minamo, Haru and Holon, and instead focuses on Souta and especially his father. As it turns out, he’s a businessman, and he’s the chief of the unit that keeps the metal up and running. Perhaps this was already revealed in a previous episode, but I’m having enough trouble understanding this series as it is, and this episode was particularly dialogue-heavy.

Having said that, though, this episode was really good. It’s a bit like a social commentary, and how much people have become dependant of the metal. In this episode, it only goes down for a few minutes, and it’s already featured in the news, and the responsible one (Souta’s father) has been demoted. Again, it makes sense: today, more and more people become dependant on the internet.

So, if I understood things correctly: everything started with that red phenomenon, we saw in episode one. Kushima then probably oversaw the creation of the metal, based on that red phenomenon. I think that that’s where the whole issue of cyber-diving comes from, as it’s starting to look like the metal is an extension of the ocean, like how in this episode, a virus managed to reach the main database through the ocean.

Souta’s relationship with his father was a breath of fresh air in terms of having parents who are very busy with their jobs. Anime usually make a very big deal out of this, but Real Drive handled it subtly. Of course, when he was young, and his mother left to Australia to raise Minamo with her own mother, he was left all alone, and of course he felt sad, but over time, he began to accept the fact that his father is a busy man, and instead he decided to help him whenever he could. Quite a change from Production IG’s previous major anime: Ghost Hound, where Masayuki and his family totally grew away from each other.

I’m really surprised at how little hate there is in this series. So far, the only real evil intentions came from Kushima’s boss (who Souta turns out to be sleeping with O.o) and the hackers from episode four. And yet none of them feel like real villains, like you usually see in anime. Usually, anime add in a little grudge here and there, to spice things up a bit, but in Real Drive, most of the conflict comes from people’s own interpretations to how they should live.

I’m really loving this series more and more, simply because it’s one of these series that attempts to do something new and innovative. It’s series like this one that keep pushing anime further, instead of repeating the same harem over and over. Seriously, what is so great about watching ten different series in which a guy gets surrounded by five or six different girls with different distinctive personalities/stereotypes? I can understand why you want to watch such a series once or twice, but what’s the merit of watching virtually the same thing ten or more times after each other? What seems to be that hidden charm of series as To Love-ru and Kanokon that I can’t seem to understand, aside from the obvious fanservice? Is this the “anime as escapism” that people seem to be talking about lately?

One rather annoying side-effect of the recent arrests of the Share-uploaders is that the amount of fake files uploaded on Share has drastically increased. What adds to the annoyance is that the raw uploaders on Tokyo Toshokan don’t seem to check the files they get from Share, so there were times in which I downloaded the same fake file twice. That was not fun.

Oh and yeah. In this episode, the creators found it a good idea to stuff the Real Drive girls in swimsuits. That’s what I call pure guts. Anime nowadays are rather obsessed at making their girls (and boys often as well, though it’s less apparent) as perfectly-looking as possible. Overweight is already a large problem right now, so just imagine how the problem would look like in sixty years from now. It’s great to see some variety in them.

In this episode, I also noticed something strange, as that the episode was finished before I knew it. When the ending-credits rolled, I was like “wait, it’s finished already?” For some strange reason, this episode felt like only ten minutes, instead of twenty. Surprisingly little happened in it for a Real Drive-episode: it’s just the case of a virtual-reality girl who ends up at Minamo’s school and becomes known as a ghost. This ghost fools Minamo’s friends a bit, and then Souta arrives and explains what happened.