Category: Shinrei Tantei Yakumo

This series has… something. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I like this show surprisingly much because of it and this episode solidified that for me. I mean, this has been the first fast-paced Bee-Train series since Murder Princess, and even though Koichi Mashimo’s absence is very apparent here, but the charms of the characters still shine through here.

I also like the formula this show is using: the first half of every episode is usually not very special, and mostly used to set things up, only for the second half to set things off with interesting twists, new and interesting pieces of music, and to close off each episode we have those mysterious monologues of the main bad guys of the series that get more intriguing with every episode. I know that the individual stories of this series aren’t exactly mystery, but the overall story is doing a very good job at it.

I think that at this point, the biggest flaw of this series is its coincidences, but it’s nothing too major at the point, and it’s used well. And I guess that it was an interesting twist for Yakumo to learn about his mother by running into someone who happened to know her around the time she was pregnant. It’s definitely an interesting twist here that Yakumo’s mother tried to strangle him before disappearing, rather than having her be the usual “mother who is gone” stereotype.

This show definitely is a good example of how to adapt a show on a tight budget and timespan. It’s far from the best that Bee-Train has produced, but I’m still enjoying it a lot here.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Whether a series follows its original source material exactly, like High School of the Dead, it takes its time telling its story and even adds a bit here and there like Nurarihyon no Mago, or whether it tries to put 180 pages into just one episode: it all has the potential to work out well, as long as the creators have a vision and manage to capture the essence of the source material they’re dealing with. Yakumo is a pretty good example of this: it’s indeed rushed but that also gives it its charms. Making a 13 episode anime is completely different from making a 26 episoded one: with the latter, you can take your time and flesh out the cast and the setting, and carefully build up everything. With the former, you do not.

This show has its flaws. This episode was probably the least interesting one so far due to the time it wasted on that rather long car chase scene, on top of this weird coincidence of Haruka being in the exact same car as the bad guy here as he got possessed (that’s something I also really wonder how the manga made plausible…).

Still, I liked this episode, and especially the chemistry between Yakumo and that detective Kazutoshi. At first Yakumo seems a bit of a clone of Ghost Hunt’s Naru-chan, but it’s these things that form the subtle differences between the two. This episode also established that he isn’t perfect, and that there are also cases in which he fails to make a difference. That’s always nice.

What also impressed me was the soundtrack here. Sure, this series’ soundtrack is nowhere near Bee-Train’s better works, but on its own it really is excellent. It’s not all over the place like usual with Bee-Train, and yet it’s varied, creative. It’s really the soundtrack that saved that car chase scene here.
Rating: * (Good)

Okay, I may have to explain myself quite a bit for labelling this as one of the two non-sequels that I immediately found good enough to blog this season. I mean, this isn’t because I’m a Bee-Train fan: I’m a fan of Bee-Train because of Koichi Mashimo and he wasn’t involved here, and it’s also not like I have my criticisms about Shinrei Tantei Yakumo. Yet, while this may seem like a Ghost Hunt rip-off, it’s actually completely different.

I know that this is something very subjective, but out of all of the first episodes I watched this season so far, this series is the one that stuck to my mind the most, aside from perhaps Letter Bee. This show is strange, it advertises itself as a mystery-series, while it actually completely isn’t. It makes no attempt to build up it’s mystery: one moment it introduces things and only a minute later it has already revealed the main culprit. Still, the more I think about it, the more I realize how every moment of this series is meant to contribute to its characters: whether this is the main cast or the side-cast, it doesn’t matter: Yakumo has no wasted scenes whatsoever. I mean, I’m crazy if I’m not going to blog something like that.

This episode again: the genre it belongs to the most was freaking Iyashi-kei. I mean, what the heck? The entire episode went completely against the thriller-esque mood that this series built up, and instead told the story about two old guys and the relationship they had with a woman who died in their past. The story they told about themselves was short and to the point, and yet it worked somehow. And Yakumo… from a bishified detective he actually turned into a medium of all things: his purpose in this series revolves more around healing people’s deep scars by letting them meet their loved ones who died, rather than solving some cheesy mystery here.

I also love that this series is episodic: that’s really something that this series needs, considering that it’s only got 13 episodes. The past two episodes have been rushed, indeed. But they were also short and to the point. I really applaud the creators to put so much meaning into them in so little time. Especially considering how half this episode was focused on Yakumo himself, rather than those two old guys. That uncle of Yakumo succeeded in making Yakumo into more than just another stereotypical silent badass.

Yakumo doesn’t have the biggest budget, and at times the acting also feels a bit flat. But unlike Togainu no Chi, this series provided more than enough to keep my interests: it did a lot of stuff here, in just two episodes. I also love those parts at the end of each episode, which try to foreshadow the main plot and try to keep the different episodes together. They’ve got this really neat atmosphere, completely different from the episode that preceded them. It’s there where this series also doesn’t get afraid to get a little artsy, especially in the previous episode.
Rating: ** (Excellent)