Category: Zetsuen no Tempest

So, after last week’s recap Zetsuen no Tempest is back for real. And it has already started building the intrigue by hinting at stuff that might or might not be true but when true could mean one heck of a baffling plot twist. The thing is that in this episode, it presents two theories that both are completely inplausible.

So previously, it was established that only a mage of exodus could have killed Aika, in order to be able to escape Hakaze’s web. This episode presents us two mages: Yoshino and this wimpy kid who can’t control his powers yet. With the information we have right now, there is no way in which any of those two could have killed Aika. Yoshino may be crazy, but he’s not crazy enough to just kill his own girlfriend. That wimpy guy too: he can’t even control his powers yet.

So… someone is hiding something… either the wimpy guy (sorry, I can’t remember his name right now while typing this) is putting up an act in order to get close to the Mage of Exodus… which is pretty likely considering he just bumped into her (although that could have been one of the trees as well…). Or Yoshino is a complete bastard who murdered his own girlfriend for some kind of really, really important reason. It’d explain why he is not as mad as Mahiro for her death. It would not explain his ties to the army, his oblivion to Hakaze’s crush (which was an awesome plot twist, by the way).

Also, new OP and ED. For the OP… I don’t like the OP. It’s a song that is copy pasted from all other ops out there, and in a bad way. The ED is a bit cheesy, but it works. But producers, come on. You’ve got such an awesome soundtrack. Then why skimp on the OP and ED?
Rating: 5.5/8 (Excellent)

Recap. And it’s the kind of annoying recap that you can’t fully skip because it contains some new material at the beginning and at the end. I did fully watch it this time, though. The reason for that is how important flashbacks are for this series (heck, one of the main characters has been dead throughout the entire series’ airtime thanks to that). Still, it is just copy-pasted, so in that aspect, this individual episode doesn’t win many points….

Having said that though, there was a significant amount of content at the end of the end of the episode, much more than usual. It’s meant to be an aftermath to the previous episodes. And holy crap, two billion people died!? The series then proceeds to tell how the world has been “saved” by the tree of genesis (killing people whenever a fight breaks out between them), and they pick this episode of all things to show what happened when Mahiro found Aika’s dead body.

What I liked best was the intrigue that popped up at the end of the episode, though. Apparently Yoshino has been running off on his own, dowing all sorts of things with probably Hakaze (although this was not mentioned), and the next number of episodes will focus on Mahiro running after Yoshino for this. I know that the first half of this provided hints that this would happen (how he had ties with the army and all). The delivery of this twist was also really good: the entire recap was told through Mahiro’s perspective, even though the first half was told in Yoshino’s perspective. That made me glad that I watched the recap in order to prepare for this change. Watching the same thing you’ve already seen before remains annoying, though.

EDIT: I just realized this after I nearly went to post this, but damn you Bones and your after-ED content. You keep pulling these scenes after your EDs and it’s damn misleading. Not to mention that it was a huge scene that it revealed there….
Rating: 4/8 (Good)

Oh no, the world will be destroyed! Just like in 50% of all other action series! Yeah, if you want to do this, then you need to make it count.Just putting the world at stake at this point is adequate, but standalone it just doesn’t make enough impact, to the point where it can even feel shallow. Zetsuen no Tempest is very good at avoiding this.

In this series the world is at stake, and you really feel like the world is at stake. It keeps driving home that this can pretty much happen on a whim: it’s unknown what will happen, and wrong move will just blow everything up. The characters are just thrown between two huge trees, either of which is trying to make this happen. In this episode things started to get really out of control, and even though this series doesn’t show many people gathered at the same place or huge crowds, it did drive home that something really big is so easily about to happen. The shots of the businessmen trying to map everything that the tree was doing was enough for that.

Beyond that, I still love this series’ style of storytelling. It just takes what it has, and then uses one of its characters to completely turn over the logic in this series, again and again and again. I also love the way this series plays with logic: normally this is something that can’t be influenced, but here there are these two giant trees that are playing russian roulette with it. Very good depiction of the utterly hopeless situation that the characters are in.

Also, the soundtrack! The godly soundtrack! Really, I am going to write a post on my favorite soundtracks of the year. I can’t believe how many great soundtracks 2012 had in comparison to previous years. I just need to find a good way to publish it…
Rating: 6/8 (Awesome)

This show. Talk about a mindscrew. This episode once again was just brilliant. There was so little action in this episode: it was just people talking, trying to convince each other and trying out various kinds of diabolical schemes. This episode just kept pushing things further, and added things like defying logic and fate to the mix.

I can’t believe how well the build-up of the previous episodes got used. This episode finally revealed how people are able to talk through each other, and immediately this show uses that theory to make a plausible explanation for Hakaze to return. And as if that wasn’t already a twist enough, it turns out that one of the biggest reasons for the plot to actually start was wrong: nobody from the clan killed Aika.

There were two things that I realized here that got left unmentioned, but need to be answered. First of all, how does suicide work? Could it be that Aika wasn’t murdered, but instead orchestrated her death herself. In any case it is very heavily being hinted that Aika was the priestess of the tree of Exodus. Second of all… are they going to remember to remove those strings on Hakaze’s skeleton. I mean, I shiver at the thought that they’ll remain stuck out of her body if this goes on!
Rating: 6/8 (Awesome)

Okay, so for those who haven’t read the previous work of the author of this series, Spiral: it is basically a series dedicated to mind-games. The characters move from one elaborate puzzle to the other and there is this evil organization that requires them to solve it. It’s fun, but also pretty formulaic and these mind games were pretty much the only reason to keep watching it. If anything though, it showed tht the author is really good at them. But holy crap, I must say that he really struck gold with Zetsuen no Tempest.

Spiral was just a series in which people moved from mind-game to mind-game. Zetsuen no Tempest instead has an epic storyline that happens to have mind-games in them. It has much more to offer than just the mind games, but when they appear, they really shine like never before. After all of the build-up and world building that the series did in the past, we can finally get to the point where this has to be used in order to out-wit Samon, and this is just the second week in a row in which my mind has been blown. You can really see Spiral as the prototype for Zetsuen no Tempest.

I love how Yoshino just came up with this ridiculous theory that makes no sense in order to bet under Samon’s skin. You really don’t often see a villain who isn’t completely confident in his cause, but that makes it all the more interesting: in this story, he is the one trying to achieve his goal against all odds and instead the main characters have someone like Hakaze, who can pretty much nuke the world on a whim when she gets the chance. It’s such a fascinating change of roles here.

And yeah, I loved how Yoshino tricked Samon in giving away something really crucial here: the nature of time travel in this world: if you talk to someone in the past, the effects of that become noticeable immediately. They can really use this: now that Hakaze knows that she will die, she can take actions to prevent it, and these actions will manifest themselves in the world they’re currently in. Just how? Who knows?
Rating: 6/8 (Awesome)

Okay, I think I just watched the single best episode of the Autumn Season from the series that started there at least. That was just amazing.

THIS is what I mean with using your build-up well. After the slow pacing of the previous episode that took so much time in showing flashbacks, and was so careful in setting everything up for this episode, having everything just turned completely upside down within 20 minutes was just freaking amazing. I’m just blown away by this.

Everything came together here. It was already one thing that Hakaze was living in the past, but then this episode came with Mashiro who easily changed sides, Samon who was too busy clinging on trying to keep things safe as possible, Yoshino coming with that ridiculous idea to get Mashiro to change sides yet again. The delivery was also just perfect, I loved how blown away Samon was by all this, or how on-wavering Mashiro was from his goal. Yoshino as an observer also played a brilliant part, and at the center are these two dead girls who had such a large indirect impact on everything.

And holy crap, the music of this show is awesome! It had been on the background for the past few episodes, but this time it played a really big role again. And with this, yeah. Not even Jojo or Psycho Pass can match how well this OST manages to contribute to its series when it’s really on fire.

This episode once again gave me that delightful feeling of being blown away by something. It’s not a feeling that I get often, and yet I’m really glad that this show achieved it, because I love it, and it just kept going, without any weak spot whatsoever. Please Tempest, keep up this pace.
Rating: 7/8 (Fantastic)

This season is delightful in how many long series there are, and it really shows in the progression of the series: lots of shows are still in their building up stage. There are so many shows who actually have the time to set things up correctly. And the thing is that the build-up of these series is really good. Tempest is probably the purest in build-up, having the slowest pacing so far in terms of stuff happening, but this episode delivered one heck of a cliff-hanger.

There were the hints: that skeleton should have come from somewhere. It’s still a bit hard to believe that a body would decay entirely within just two years, but nevertheless, I love this time travel twist when it appears that not only has Hakaze spoken to the future, she will die shortly as well. On top of that, it’s looking more and more like the main characters in this series are the villains, set up by the Tree of Genesis who is really hinted to have orchestrated Aika’s murder. It also makes this quite an impressive series in which half the main cast is already dead at the start of the series. You don’t see that often.

Meanwhile the background of this series is getting more and more interesting, combining a lot of fiction together. Destroying the world in order to recreate it without flaws is turning into a cliche right now, but this show uses it well with its back-story. After the incredibly fast-paced Eureka Seven Ao and Un-Go, it’s also interesting to see Bones do another really slow-paced series again and making it work.
Rating: 5/8 (Great)

A romance episode, with the fantastic soundtrack that this series has. That’s quite something different for a change, but boy, was it good. This episode just continued to show the relationship between Mahiro, Yoshino and Aika. The pacing is much slower than I expected after the first episode, but the detail this episode brought in their relationship was really impressive, even without the soundtrack.

The subtle chemistry between the three of them was particularly great: each one of them had something of an edge: the romantic tension between Yoshino and Aika was great in how Aika kept teasing him, the awkwardness between Mahiro and Aika was great, and Yoshino’s mistrust compared to Mahiro’s trust was great too.

And then there is the way in which this series has been building up for the past couple of episodes with a really long background arc, and I must say, that it did this the right way: by making the build-up interesting, and the thing they’re building up for with a lot of potential: at the end of the episode I really couldn’t wait for the story to continue again, and yet I never once got bored during the flashback arc. The third thing that this show needs to do is actually make the build-up worth it. Ah well, that’s up for next week.
Rating: 5.5/8 (Excellent)

This is the episode where Zetsuen no Tempest set itself apart. It already had hints before that its story was very different from the usual, but here this really paid off when suddenly everything is turned upside down.

I mean, before it just seemed that there were a bunch of parties that were all acting independantly. This episode revealed so much connections between the different characters, and all of those connections are different. This episode was full of all sorts of bonds, from alliances to truces; I really liked the diversity.

Especially Mahiro impressed me in this episode, though. His mistrust of Yoshino, combined with how Yoshino seems to trust him completely worked really well in this episode, especially combining the tensions with Aika. It’s an interesting episode to reveal that the two of them were more than just siblings. And as much as I’d like to pull the hate card for doing the not blood-related thing again, they actually chose that relationship themselves, rather than making it some contrived excuse to have incest.

Also, Hakaze actually being the one more likely to destroy the world. Nice twist.
Rating: 5.5/8 (Excelllent)

I must say, this episode found quite an interesting place for its characters to fight: inside an aquarium. They also used this whale skeleton, and I have to say that it’s quite a bit better than “generic street 232”.

But that was not what this episode was really about: it was about the villains. Even though most of the screentime showed the lead characters, it detailed the back-story for this series, who Samus is, what he does, why he left his strongest enemy on an island instead of just killing her, and it’s revealed that he instead just declared her dead.

Also, everything happens for a reason. The show will very likely build further upon this theme for the rest of the series, but for now it’s already quite interesting in the way that the dead girl used to say this. After dying…. this left quite an impression on Yoshino. Also, this may have been me missing something, but has it already been revealed how she died?

At least we now know why he has the hairstyle he has: it’s something she gave to him. Should have seen that coming. I do wonder what happened to his glasses, though. Did he end up wearing contacts?
Rating: 5/8 (Great)