Category: RD Sennou Chousashitsu

Really, this series continues to surprise me. When I first read the premise, I thought that this series would be something like Dennou Coil or Ghost in the Shell, but I’m still struggling to find a good series to compare this to. Real Drive has become much more light-hearted than I think anyone could have expected, but because of that it’s able to show exactly how people have come to live with the metal, and it’s really able to show the ins and outs of its premise, and the creators can really show their vision of the future, and it’s really great to have series as this one show a more positive view on the future, instead of the bleak corrupted and screwed-up science-fiction series.

This time: pets. I absolutely love the little touches, where chips have been invented that translate what dogs can say (in fact, why shouldn’t this be possible in fifty years?), but there still are a few flaws in the translation, like it mistaking “food” for “friend”. That’s indeed a typical characteristic of software like this: it may do its job 90% of the cases, but it obviously can’t be perfect. It’s the same thing as in episode five: that cyborg was great at fighting, but as soon as he needed to do something else, he became like a three year-old.

The thing is that this series is already so much fun, even though all it’s been doing is building up. I really can’t wait to see this series enter its second half, and use what it’s been building up for, especially considering the director: chevalier had a rather boring first half, but it so much made up for this with its second half, and the same goes for nearly all of his work.

To call Real Drive unconventional would be a bit understatement. When I went into this series, I expected a huge focus on technology and heavy terms, but the focus on Minamo ended up much bigger than I thought. This yet again was another episode without diving.

In this episode, a book that Minamo’s reading turns out to have parts cut off. She initially believes that this is some kind of message or love-letter. Holon, however, corrects her, and says that it’s probably a protest made when all the books got digitalized. Obviously disappointed by this, Minamo tells her grandmother about it (wasn’t she on Haru and Eiichiro’s team before Haru got his accident?) and her grandmother suggests her checking out a certain book called “love letter”.

Minamo starts reading the book, and although it’s a bit too “mature” for her, she’s quickly drawn in. Then, when she just reached the end, t turns out that the final page is missing. Haru then explains that that missing page has been blank all along, and the original purpose of the ending was for the reader to make his or her own conclusion. Apparently, this page was ripped out to write a letter. I’m not sure about the details (Holon is just too much of a walking thesaurus when she starts talking!), but I think that it was meant to preserve a message and to prevent it from getting lost in the digitalization of the books. I that that book kept its final pages blank on purpose, so that who read it could use these pages to write a letter to his or her loved one…

In the end, Minamo finds a name on that book. She’s died now, but as it turns out, she was a former colleague of Haru and Eiichiro as well, before the accident. In the end, I think that Minamo’s grandmother told her about the book, and she rented it herself. She then got inspired to write a small letter to Haru, though she never delivered it. The book then remained in the library for forty years until Minamo picked it up again.

I must say that this was a very interesting way to show something about the people that Haru left behind when he went in coma (at least, I assume that she wrote that letter after Haru’s accident, but I’m not sure. I can’t seem to find the exact date of it). As it turns out, that woman died two years before Haru woke up again. This yet again proofs how the director is a master of characterizations: he knows exactly how to develop them and make the audience care about them, as he showed in Tsuiokuhen, Chevalier and the recent Amatsuki.

I really must say that this is the series I look forward to the most each week. This really is different from your usual mystery-series, as we still hardly know anything about the concept beyond the basics. The thing with this series is that it likes to reveal its mysteries as little as possible. And personally, I love the way the creators decided to handle this.

This episode was… strange…

Here I was, expecting a serious story about some freakish killer that was on the loose, after watching the next-episode preview of the previous episode. What I got was an episode that was way sillier than I expected. Episode five seems to be a popular time to insert a bit of silliness: first we had Macross, then Code Geass, and now Real Drive as well. Still, out of all three, I believe that this episode did its job best.

Shortly summarized: Haru is absent in this episode for a medical examination, as an android that’s meant for wrestling goes out of control and attacks everyone who comes into his sight. It wears a bunch of sunglasses that seem to be the latest fashion, though at one point these glasses break. It then runs into an unfortunate Minamo, who just bought an exact same pair of glasses. I guess that his internal AI switches to item-retrieving-mode, as it tries to gently get its glasses back without breaking them (Minamo should be lucky that she actually wore these, otherwise she’d just have been beaten up). At the same time, Souta laments the fact that he isn’t strong enough.

I should be getting angry at the coincidence at which Minamo bought her glasses, but at least this made this episode surprisingly fun to watch. I also liked how the creators showed how the android wasn’t completely fine-tuned: when the lights went off, he suddenly lost his target, he’s completely useless when he needs to take something from someone without hurting it (I guess it was never programmed to retrieve items that could escape, being a wrestling-android and all).

One thing I appreciate of this series: it’s diverse. Every single episode so far has been different, and that will really work in its advantage for the future episodes. Series that often take place in the same mood for episodes after each other have a bigger tendency to get boring when compared to series like this one. It helps keeping the series fresh, and series like Bokura no showed me how successful these techniques can really be if they’re handled well. So far, Real Drive has managed to be diverse and yet it kept advancing its story and introduced new things. This episode showed interesting insights in how androids are built and used, in relation to the metal.

In this episode, it was quite fun to watch an android, trying to do something it wasn’t programmed for. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a thing in anime tackled like this, but I of course have yet to watch the Ghost in the Shell-series. ^^;

This series continues to intrigue me, for some reason. This episode was clearly meant to flesh out the concept of “Metal”, now that the introduction is finally over. Knowing the director, and the fact that this is an anime-original story, just like Chevalier, I think we can expect lots of building up in the first half, that’ll cleverly be used in the second half of this series.

Still, even though it’s building up, this series still manages to remain interesting due to its concepts, and the fact that it didn’t play all of its trumps in the first episodes. In this episode, while the person in question who has been trapped inside the Metal isn’t that relevant to the story, this episode does offer a lot of new things about the metal, and finally things become a bit clear, as to why Metal turned so important. It’s not only used for things like power plants, but civilians can also use it. In this case, a salaryman uses it to escape from reality and be surrounded by loads of beautiful woman.

The problem is that this episode a lot of complicated monologues, so it was pretty hard to understand what the assistant of this salaryman was trying to say. Apparently, he was quite an important person, yet at the same time he remained a regular guy due to his sexual desires. If I understood correctly, then he was inside the metal when the power went down on the island (I guess that the cyber-divers used a emergency back-up power-system to enter the power plant, back in episode 2), and his brains went down. Later, the corrupted data seems to have turned him into one of the women, and this same data tries to affect Haru, as he tries to get the guy back. Minamo then proves to be the mystery-element in this series, when she somehow manages to connect to Haru from outside, and apparently they can reach each other no matter what’s happening.

There also seems to have been a bit of influence from outside. They probably made alterations to Zouhen(the salaryman)’s data, to change him into a woman and prevent him from re-entering. I’m not sure about their motives, though. Heck, I couldn’t catch anything that looked like it explained this.

This episode also introduces the two characters in the OP who make strange faces, along with Minamo and Haru. I was surprised to find out that they’re both guys, (that big guy really looked like some GAR woman in the OP). On top of that, they seem to be brothers. The little guy seems to be a cyber-diver as well, and he failed to get back Zouhen earlier.

I also must say that this series has the most solid OP and ED this season. They really fit the strange nature of this series. With the heavy J-rock, combined with the strange images. I also like how the episode previews don’t spoil anything about the next episode, but instead provide an introduction to the concept of the next one. One reason why I often avoid next-episode previews on series is because you’ll never know when they’ll spoil you too much for the next episode. Especially Naruto was a heavy offender of this, though RD seems to use them very nicely.

I love the thing that this series is trying to prove: you can even have a great story if your main characters aren’t perfectly looking guys or girls. So many of them have lost their parents, so many of them have had a troubled childhood and they’ve had to endure the most horrible things in some cases, but nearly all of them have a perfect thyroid. Minamo may be annoying at times, but the only other female main character in anime that I can recall who doesn’t look perfect in every single way is Sunako from Yamato Nadeshiko Shichi Henge. Heck, even among major side-characters you hardly see any non-perfect-looking girls or women. Gintama and Blue Drop are the only two that I can name out of the top of my head. In the same way, I can’t remember any other anime with a main character of above seventy years old apart from Millennium Actress.

Anyway, enough blabbering. It indeed turns out that the diver from the previous episode was Haru, and in this episode attempts are made to find out what made him change back to his 30-year old self inside Metal. A few tests are run, to see whether he’s an able cyber-diver, but after numerous tests, he keeps on failing in his original body. In the end, it turns out that Minamo, combined with a dire situation is able to trigger this change. When Minamo checks up on the guy, for a minute she sees the face of his younger self. I’m not sure whether that was just her imagination, or the influence of Metal is more than just on-line. This episode already showed that divers are screwed if they dive too far into Metal and lose consciousness, because you actually need to get your cyber-body back. Much like the Matrix, actually.

On a totally different side-note: the fansub-scene has changed quite a bit compared to two years ago. Really, at this point, roughly two weeks after the start of the season, RD and Kaiba have finally also gotten subbed and the only unsubbed series left is out of all series Toshokan Sensou. I remember that two years ago, I had to wait four weeks until the majority of new series had gotten its subs. The fansubbers are slowly changing from quality-based to speed-based. I remember how back then, people used to talk bad about speedsubbers, but right now everybody seems to have accepted them.

As usual, the shows I’m not blogging this season:
– I’ve heard many diverging opinions about the manga of Vampire Knight. The arguments against it say that the manga is just your average angst-fest, and how it’s nothing special. The only argument in favour of it that I could find was “Bishies! Bishies! Bishies!” Really, just as with Haruhi Suzumiya, it feels like the fans are hyping the wrong parts of the series!
– Monochrome Factor is really weird, though the main female lead gets really on my nerves.

In any case, it was pretty obvious that I’d end up blogging this series. Personally, I LOVE series with a high amount of imagination, and RD has along with Kaiba been the most imaginative series of the new season. It’s going to be difficult as usual to try and understand it, but I see this as an interesting challenge.

The OP also rocks, and the ED as well. In any case, this episode shows us more about the female heroine Minamo Aoi and it introduces the concept of cyber-diving, as the power of the house for the elder-care needs to be restored. Meanwhile, Masamichi is still an old man (I like how this series doesn’t play all of its trumps in the first two episodes, yet packs a punch).

It turns out that Minamo grew up in Australia with her grandmother, while her mother worked on the “Metal” in Japan. If I had to guess, then she came to work at the home for elders because of her brother (Souta) and her mother’s influences. But I think that the fact that her grandmother used to know Eiichiro and Masamichi also played a role. She also turns out to be someone who likes to learn a lot, although she is your typical girl who hit puberty. Still, she isn’t as annoying as some of her counterparts, and my only real gripe with this series is the really strange placement of fanservice. We get random crotch-shots, panty-shots that come out of nowhere. That’s not something I expected from Production IG and the director of Chevalier. I mean, they had nudity before, but it has always felt rather natural up till now.

There’s also one bit that I failed to pick up: why did Minamo’s grandmother age, while Eiichi still looks the same as he did, fifty years before? Is this because some people have access to better health-care facilities than others?