Ideally, we’d want a list of exactly what kind of episodes of Gintama’s sequel are worth watching and which ones aren’t. It’s going to make this series much more accessible to the ones who can’t be bothered to sit through the bad episodes at this point. I myself am nudging more and more to that group. In any case, let me at least start for the first eleven episodes of the second season:
Skippable: Episodes 1-7
Worth watching: Episodes 8-11
The first eight episodes were random stories, where episodes 9 to 12 consist out of the Otose arc. This Otose arc is really recommended, more on that below. As for the random episodes, the only one that I can really recommend is the eighth one, in which the characters start toying with recap episodes again. Out of all of the running gags, that’s the one that still works at this point. I also wouldn’t really recommend the Catherine episode: that one was basically the creators screaming “Find this sad!” It didn’t even prepare for the Otose arc either.
In any case, I remember clearly that the first episode focusing on Otose (I believe it was episode eleven, so this goes way back) was the point where I first realized that the original series would be something special, and not just a focus on good laughs. Finally, 200 episodes later we see this story continued, and at the very least I’m glad to have stuck with this series at this point, because the added background to Otose was just excellent.
Oh, and Otose’s younger form was awesome. It usually works great when a younger version of a character is shown to illustrate how much he/she changed, but for an old lady this works even better. The story created around this was just great: it’s both tragic, yet unlike the Catherine episode it’s not just there for cheap cries. It adds a lot of new stuff to Otose’s character and it feels genuine for nearly all of the involved characters.
Now, I hardly ever edit posts aside from fixing typos, but with this one I’ll continue updating the above list for as long as I keep watching this series. I’ll probably drop this series some time around the beginning of the Summer season, due to how incredibly busy it’s looking out to be, so let me know when any new awesome episodes pop up from this series.
Rating: ** (Excellent)
This episode is more of a ‘calm before the storm’ episode, mainly dealing with the setup for the big battle next week. Not as good to watch as the previous episode, although the background story of Jirocho, Otose and Terada was very interesting and well executed. All that’s left is just to wait for next week then.
I’m enjoying this new Arc very much, the back-story on Otose, Jirocho, and Terada this episode is quite interesting when you take into account Pirako’s version of the story earlier.
It’s an interesting arc, but what disappointed me was that the emotional scenes were just not… emotional.
So, you didn´t think the first two Episodes of the new season were awesome?
Btw. episode 8 was totally 1:1 to one of the Gintama OVA´s (the fake trailer). So for those who already saw it, it wasn´t THAT funny since only the dialouge was slightly re-written.
Ultima: well, so much for Gintama being funny, then.
As for the first two episodes: they had their funny moments, but overall it had too many moments for me that felt just forced or repetitive.