Chihayafuru – 15

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)