Even after its third instalment, FREEDOM still doesn’t fail to entertain, and yet again, it leaves us with another powerful climax. This probably is strengthened even more by the ED. The best OPs and EDs, in my opinion, don’t just consist of good songs, but also contribute to the anime they belong to. Mushishi, for example, just went on with its peaceful mood even when the ED set in. The OP for Wellber no Monogatari is a perfect introduction, which captures the essence of the anime quite nicely. It’s so much better than these OPs which feature flashes of each different protagonist just because they have to, or the EDs, whose only purpose is to show the credits.
The goal of this episode: send Takeru to Earth. Pretty straightforward, and it’s handled quite decently. He managed to escape from these strange robots we saw in the previous episode, barely avoiding suffocation, though. And I finally realize how important Alan is in all this. He took in the citizens who didn’t want to live in Eden. If I’m not mistaken, he called it Freedom, hence the title of this anime. Because he helped Takeru, though, he endangered it, and the citizens of Freedom are threatened to be retrained and turned into proper Eden Citizens. Still, he does manage to give Takeru instructions on how to use one of the escape rockets that were in the original version of Eden.
One thing I also like about this anime: it knows what it wants to be. It doesn’t try to introduce any needless side-quests in order to impress its viewers, it just wants to tell the story of Takeru, and how he unravels the mysteries around earth. That’s one of the advantages of being an OVA: you can’t waste time on needless fillers. So far, things have been very believable, with only a few botches, like the fact that when you slowly drive a car, it uses less fuel than when you race at full speed, and the fact that Tairo was very lucky to have run into Takeru like that. Apart from that, it avoided some major pitfalls, and it actually made the fact that Takeru got lifted off in the end plausible and believable. The solution for the food-source also was pretty nice, although I do wonder why people would leave a box full of instant-noodles in a place like that. XD
What also surprised me was how Kazuma ended up being left behind, while Bis, who was reluctant to go ended up going. Taira also was great when he tried to help Takeru get his way. Without him, Takeru probably would’ve failed, and I love how the rivalry between the two of them ended up. ^_^]]>
FREEDOM – 03
