Category: Chihayafuru

Shock! Gasp! Surprise! A major character actually put on weight!? In anime where characters always need to look perfect!?

I mean, once in a while we get overweight side characters here and there, like Nishida in this series. But the main antagonist? It’s really been a while since we had one of those, let alone characters whose physique changes so drastically. Of course it’s a bit exaggerated here, but this was nevertheless a really interesting twist.

Heck, I’m really baffled here. Ever since the show was announced, I’ve been dreading this moment: the ending, knowing that there was no way for this show to end well. And here, this show actually pulls off a stunning penultimate episode.

I don’t care about wrapping things up, but for me an ending needs to take the series, its themes, characters and push them even further. So yeah, the actual king and queen match are a great way for this show to close off. This really goes against all conventions. I really was expecting this show ending with Chihaya playing some random match, as is the norm with all other sports shows. And instead, this episode was completely different, yet completely in line with the rest of the series. It shows the level that Chihaya has yet to reach: a match between two players of actual Queen material. She played them both, but actually watching the two of them play taught her how much she still needs to grow. Shinobu blew her away in the first match, but in this episode she really became human. And again we’ve got another top player who becomes a bit weaker (yet much more intriguing) due to some imperfection or laziness.

I really admire the guts of the creators to not have this episode revolve around Chihaya (like the entire rest of the series), but instead put two side-characters into the spotlights. These kinds of creative twists are some that I can really appreciate, especially when the characters in question are so damn good. Chihaya herself also had a great place in this episode so she still is the main character here.

Now, I have a message to the next episode: end with an ACTUAL ending. I don’t want to see a sequel hook, or the feeling that there still is going to be some sort of next episode or something. It’s obvious that this show isn’t going to get a sequel, now make use of that! What I want is “here is an awesome and creative climax that pushes the characters to new levels!” not “thanks for watching and let’s hope that someday we can tell the rest of this story…” This show deserves it!
Rating: *** (Awesome)

Okay. We’ve finally gotten near the point that has been looming over the entire series: the ending. At first I thought that the creators wanted the finale to focus on a really important match, but Chihaya’s loss last week made that impossible. This episode instead was really different from all of the previous episodes. And to be honest: this would have been a great point to close off this series, knowing that it had to.

Finally Chihaya is doing something other than Karuta. Finally her character is growing and experiencing new things. The romance subplot also would have worked even better if the creators didn’t shoehorn such an obvious loser into the picture. With this episode I also realized how rare these kinds of parties are in anime. Usually everyone focuses on festivals and all, but simple events where everyone goes to some bar or something hardly ever happen.

Also, I would have said that Taichi is getting on my nerves. But I really liked the part where Chihaya locked herself into the closet. My big fear is that with two episodes left, his angst won’t go anywhere. This guy still needs to develop and as corny as it is, I hope that the final two episodes will focus on this. I also do this because at this point, it will get really hard to use Karuta as the climax for this series. And don’t get me wrong: there have been plenty of series with one-episode or two-episode finales, and I loved many of them. But not with series who only adapt part of their manga and cut off right in the middle of their story.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Holy crap, Chihayafuru. Out of all of the minor characters that Chihaya had to face so far, this was by far the best match against it, and it totally went against my expectations. Yamamoto Yumi was wonderfully fleshed out in just one episode, and as a first I actually found myself rooting for both, rather than the match being a simple “protagonist versus non-protagonist”.

I really thought that at this point, Chihaya would get to the queen finals, but then again that may also be because the story is nowhere finished, I kept hoping for some sort of finale with Arata and the Queen. At this rate that ending is not going to be about an important match at all, but who cares? With this series’ writing talent they can still find a ton of great points to end on.

I loved how this episode was even more full of emotion than usual. The hot sun had a lot to do with that, but also Yamamoto and her coach really brought life to this episode, and did so in a way that I’m really not used to for characters who only appear in one episode. And as an added bonus, she wasn’t one of those “I’m really pretty”-girls like you see everywhere in anime, and yet she still looked great. The thing with anime is that it’s so focused on “hot” looking characters that more often than not, it’s the plain looking characters who stand out (and more often than not, the supposedly “hot” characters try way too hard to look good). In this case the animators gave her just as much attention as the rest of the cast, and it showed here.

Also, Chihaya: I really thought that she learned by now. And yet she was taken over by her instincts again. It just shows how hard it is to get rid of things that you’ve been doing for years. Just one tiny incentive is enough to get back to your old patterns. This episode was a great point for Chihaya to actually mess up on the show’s title card “Chihayafuru”.
Rating: *** (Awesome)

With this, Chihaya finally learned the lesson that she needed to learn: there’s more to Karuta than just timing. The thing is to also feel the flow of the cards. Humans are only human, and therefore they only have a fixed amount of time it takes them to react. The challenge for Chihaya was to 1) time her movements better and 2) use her trademark speed with that. After all the previous episodes, it was very interesting for her to run into a player who played the same way she did, with a focus on speed.

Also, these people here are harsh: talking down to this nine-year-old girl for not being as good as the second-best karuta-player in the country when she loses one match. It’s interesting how you usually see these child stars being pushed too much by their parents, but this is a nice subversion of that, in the way that her mother is putting so much effort into letting her daughter play Karuta to get her to cope with bullies.

Overall, I must praise this series for piquing my interest in Karuta. It’s not like when I watched Hikaru no Go and Shion no Ou, which made me immediately want to play the game, but that’s probably also because of how incredibly steep the learning curve is at the start: you can play Shougi and Go as a complete beginner and still do something with it; it’s as you start to think about it more you realize how incredibly complex these games are. It’s impossible for a beginner at Karuta to even play: for that you first need to spend a lot of time memorizing cards. After that, it’s not going to be a matter of depth, but rather combining strategy, speed, memorization and timing together. It’s much more a physical sport.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Oh, Taichi actually lost so that he won’t be able to play in the A-Class East Qualification tournament. Oh, wait there’s another chance for him to do so. Wait, he didn’t make that one either? oh, he got offered a promotion instead. What the.. he declined? He’s not focused on making the next tier as fast as possible, but rather as someone who doesn’t run away? Very nice here, Chihayafuru.

On top of that, this episode showed the return of Arata. Finally! Again, the encounter was short, but very sweet. The best part of this episode was how much more we got to learn of Arata’s grown up version. Up till now we’ve mainly just seen flashes of him, but here he was present for an entire episode. His worries about Chihaya and Taichi having become a couple really worked well with Taichi getting more and more depressed in this episode. Chihaya herself was the icing on the cake: her emotions went wild in this episode, and the creators portrayed them really well.

Overall, out of all of the Fall series that are still airing, Chihayafuru still stands out as the best. The way it handles its characters is just unrivaled here. As the representative of its season however, when you start to compare it to other years, it unfortunately isn’t the best: Autumn 2010 is the only fall season in more than 8 years where I didn’t consider the best 2-Cour series to be better than Chihayafuru. (As a frame of reference: 2009 had Armed Librarians, 2008 had Michiko e Hatchin, Clannad and Casshern, 2007 had Shion no Ou and Ghost Hound, 2006 had Red Garden and Bakumatsu, 2005 had Noein, Mushishi and Jigoku Shoujo, 2004 had Fantastic Children and Gankutsuou.

Obviously Chihayafuru is very well made, and in that aspect it doesn’t lose to the abovementioned series. But if I had to give a reason for why it doesn’t live up to those others for me, then it’s probably a combination of its lack of ambition and variety. The abovementioned series were series who kept evolving and kept bringing new things to the table. Chihayafuru however, has all been karuta matches, karuta matches and more karuta matches. Sure, the characters are evolving, but the plot isn’t. For me, Chihayafuru is a series that does really well when you look at the short picture, but in terms of the bigger picture it’s just karuta over and over. That’s solid, but not solid enough to measure up to some of my favorites.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

So, last week I said that the matches in this series were predictable. Immediately this show goes and proves me wrong. Okay, I take the predictability thing back.

The thing was, that everything here was being set up for Taichi to overcome his struggles and advance to join Chihaya in Class A. And yet, Nishida won. In a way, it makes sense: Taichi has the advantage of just being really, really smart and good at memorization, and he used that well, especially near the end of the match. Nishida however, has the experience. He did quit for a while, but he was the number two of Japan, something that Taichi can’t boast at all. The level at which you play when at that point, even as a kid, is completely different from usual.

That leaves me to wonder: how the heck will this show end? With what kinds of match-ups, I mean? At this point, my guess is that the only way for this to work is that Arata somehow doesn’t make his comeback at class A (Yes! Yes! Yes! He will return in time!), and therefore has to compete with Taichi for the finale of Class B, while Chihaya takes on the Queen, after said queen wins over Nishida. That would be the most predictable course of events. In about a month and a half, it’ll be interesting to see how these predictions held up. Usually it’d be the more it diverges from this predictable path, the better, but we’re talking about an incomplete adaptation here.

Oh, and what’s also really important in this episode: the character development. This was the first time where Chihaya actually became aware of the people around her. It finally occurred to her that Nishida didn’t like his nickname. And in fact, the entire class promotion of this episode was a big symbol of change: Komano and Kana really changed over the past few months as well, which really showed in the aftermath of their match.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

So, this was meant to be about the introduction episodes, in order to build up for the big matches as we reach the end of the series. And even there this show found a very good scenario: Chihaya’s loss against an opponent unimportant to the plot, and having the finale be amongst the rest of the main cast.

Also, this show really has the tendency to not show Taichi play. This episode really was apparent in that: for Chihaya it fully details how the match progresses. This episode also took a good look at how Tsutomu and Kanade played, but with Taichi we just got the description of “it’s fierce”. The episode ended with a cliff-hanger, so I wonder whether they’re going to keep this up.

One thing that is also apparent here is that the matches are kindof predictable. I’m not yet sure whether that’s an actual flaw here, because this show does not have any miracle comebacks or anything. While it’s of course natural for those to happen, I’ve seen so many sports series by now that those twists start to stand out as a bit convenient. To make up for it, this show plays around with its interesting match set-ups. Like, having the most important match right at the beginning at times.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Something very interesting happened here. Remember how the first volume of Chihayafuru completely bombed in terms of DVD sales? Well, when I checked back on the latest figures, it turns out that the second volume actually sold much better. While it’s still near the bottom of the season, the second volume sold in the order of five times as much here. That’s something you don’t see often. Still, these numbers are still far too low for a second season here. This show will end in two months.

It was up to this episode to promise that these final two months will be worth watching. And indeed, I made one really big miss-assumption with this series. The characters said that the past tournament was like the “koushien” of karuta, which lead me to believe that there is just one major tournament like this every year. Yes, I’ve probably seen too many baseball series. In any case, there still are plenty of smaller tournaments, including the tournament to decide the next queen. That’ll be a nice place to end things, and with a bit of luck this will also give a bigger role to Arata.

In the meantime, this was the expected intermezzo episode, and with that it really delivered. There was some very good banter, and we got some interesting insight into the way that Chihaya plays Karuta. The big danger for this show is to descend into a training arc at this point. I can very much identify with Chihaya’s dilemma here: having to stop focusing on what you’re best at, in order to become even better. This is something that is incredibly difficult to do, and not everyone actually manages to do it.

And yet again, this episode placed emphasis on every single character. Everyone is trying hard in his or her own way. Also bloody hell. Taichi still had contact with his girlfriend. Yes, “had”.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Okay, so this was the kind of annoying recap episode that you can’t just skip through, but actually had some new content. At the start of the episode, in the middle, at the end and after the ED were some collections of skits between the different characters. Well, I guess that if you want to animate those, then this is the perfect place for it. And as an added bonus, unlike the Mirai Nikki skets, these were actually quite funny.

Do I think that a recap episode fits in a series like this? Nah, not really. This show is simple, yet well executed. That’s not the kind of story that would really benefit from having everything repeated again. Especially considering how the creators could have actually used this episode to at least get some sort of epilogue going at the end of the season. Seriously, out of all the Autum 2011 series that are still airing, this one really is the best. But there is no way in which it’s also going to have the best ending.
Rating: (Enjoyable)

Holy crap; the creators actually intended for Taichi to steal the show this time. Chihaya was meant to lose badly, but he actually made it pretty damn close here to actually winning the entire tournament. It’s not often that you see these tournament series that allow for competing amongst different tiers of skills, but this is actually a pretty good idea here: this way you can also get the new guys and the ones who aren’t as good as the main characters show off. Taichi would have lost badly if he went up against the people that Chihaya went against, but this way his match really made for an awesome closure to this arc.

It’s also good to see that Chihaya didn’t make some sort of miracle comeback. She did improve as the match went on, due to the decrease of cards that she needed to remember, but she didn’t suddenly became so good that she somehow caught up to her opponent. Karuta isn’t the type of game for that, especially on the high levels. Instead, she made quite an impression, in a way that she surprised the queen, who thought that she could get away from this match with zero caards given away. Chihaya actually lost with a bigger difference than that tall guy, but from him, she probably played a lot safer because she expected that he was really good.

Okay, so now, it will really become the question: how the heck are the creators going to be able to upstage this? Next week we’ll likely have some sort of aftermath. After that, it’s time for the thing that I’ve been fearing the most for this series: the conclusion. Which somehow is going to have to be stuffed into 9 episodes. In theory it’s possible.. if this was an original story. It is however a manga adaptation that will go on for much longer. And it’s especially frustrating: these past few episodes have promised so much. So how much of it will actually make it in this series? The creators would have to immediately skip like, one year to make everything fall into place in time.
Rating: *** (Awesome)