The first series I’m going to blog this season… is a pretty obvious one. I blogged the first two seasons back in 2008 and 2009, and I really liked them, so it’s awesome to see a third season appear. This is one of the three series of which I was 100% sure that I was going to blog this season.
This episode really reminded why I originally fell in love with this series. When this episode aired, I felt completely refreshed. It had this completely refreshing atmosphere that I haven’t felt in a long time. This was a simple, yet wonderfully paced story about another youkai that crosses Natsume’s path. I really liked how nothing was really what it seemed: this episode dealt a lot with superstition and rumours.
Normally in anime, you can guess pretty accurately who are the good guys and the bad guys, whenever it’s not being morally ambiguous, of course. Here though, you’ll never know whether or not a youkai bears ill feelings until it starts to attack. This episode showed a dangerous looking, but well minded youkai, but then again this series did have plenty of scary youkai who did attack.
What’s especially awesome about this third season is that we’re seeing more of Reiko than ever. The previous episode already showed a lot of her, but this episode went even further. This series just kept hinting at how huge her powers were, and yet in this episode she used Rock Paper Scissors to get the name of the demon. Did she use this same trick everywhere? I mean, there have been enough youkai who unwillingly gave up their own names.
The village scene felt a bit out of place, but it was definitely an interesting representation of the mythical village: to have it be exactly like how it was painted in the past. It’s also something new in this installment of the series.
Overall, I do wonder whether this series is going to surpass itself or not. I really like this series, but I also have to admit that the second season was not as good as the first. The biggest reason for that was that it was incomplete: the episodes that built up the main storyline built up for something that wasn’t in that season, whereas the individual stories (of which the first season entirely consisted) really focused on delivering good standalone stories,. The past two episodes were in the same vein, and really wonderful to just sit back and relax at. I really wonder whether we’re going to see the build-up of the second season pay off at a point now.
Rating: ** (Excellent)
Natsume Yuujinchou is a wonderful series. It’s one of those shows where if it can keep doing what it’s been doing, I’ll be very pleased.
Hope to learn more about Reiko this season. :>
SPOILER!!!!
SPOILER!!!!
I really liked how natsume has the choice of choosing either where he is now or the utopia that is presented to him at the end of the episode… I know Reiko probably would’ve chosen the utopia like village, but Natsume deciding to stay where he is shows how he did what Reiko could never do and how he has changed from being in the position Reiko was in to being in both the youkai and human worlds..perhaps it’s because Reiko never got a “Fresh” start? Natsume got to move to a new place where he could start over while Reiko seemed to be stuck in the same place…