I scrapped the Storytelling, Characters, Production-Values and Setting-ratings from my reviews, but I still look upon anime, based on those four criteria. And really, Kyousogiga is one of the very few series that gets all of them right: it delivers everywhere, and this episode was a great example of that.
Storytelling: the second OVA is brilliantly used by changing the context of each episode and making the way all of the small bits fit into the series completely different. Everything now makes much more sense. With this the third sibling has also gotten his development, and the animation brings the characters alive wonderfully. The facial expressions say huge amounts of things about the characters, without putting them in actual words.
It’s also a great example of one of the reasons why I stopped splitting up my ratings: ideally all of these work together with each other, enhancing each other. Isolating one part is just silly, because the standout series like this one stand out because of the sum of their parts. It’s because of how many different ways the creators manage to think of to portray their characters, using meta-fiction like the one with the dog (symbolism!) to illustrate parts of the story from a different perspective, that enhances the characters and allows them to shine. In the meantime the characters develop by growing and thereby they change the story themselves. Plus, how do you rate it when a series has so much heart put into it as this series? These complex rating systems are completely pointless because you can never take everything into account. Therefore these simple ratings based on one scale are the best. What matters is the overall experience, and overall Kyousogiga is pretty damn awesome.
Another example: in this episode I realized how incredible the music here is. Alone it may have just been organ music. But it brought out so much emotions in the characters. I probably would get bored of it pretty quickly without this series.
Rating: 6/8 (Awesome)
I always wonder why do you give the rating of at most 6/8 when you praise the episode that much? I don’t understand it.
I’m confused, not about what the hell was going on this episode (well, I was, but I have come to expect that from this show), but what you said about the second ova. What second OVA? I have only seen the episodes so far (episode 0-5), am I missing something really important? This is what I hate about franchises like this, where I don’t know where to start…
Nothing important, from what I understand. Basically, the first OVA was one episode condensing the whole story into a mostly-incoherent FLCL type episode, the second OVA was 6 short episodes telling the story a bit more deliberately, and now the series finally got a full budget to tell itself properly.
The only part of the OVA not included in the series so far was the fifth episode, and that most likely is set to appear in the upcoming episode. Kyousogiga is meant to be vague in which you yourself can fill in some of the details. 😉
Just watched this, and came to the same conclusions as psgel about the use of music.