Short Synopsis: The ending of Popolocrois 2003, in which Zephys has to be defeated somehow.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
So, it’s finally finished. Wyrdwad and the other fansubbers did an awesome job in bringing the two Popolocrois series to the English community.
About the ending, it was definitely different from what I expected. With the way that Wyrdwad kept hyping it, I expected Zephys to brutally kill everyone on the entire planet before Pinon could find a way to defeat her, but instead the body count is kept relatively low and instead this episode focused at making these deaths have impact.
It got me thinking about those “everyone dies”-endings, and indeed their major flaw is that they fail to make each death have an impact. While a death in the middle of a series is a great way to include some character-development, if someone dies in the final episode, there’s hardly any character-development to get out of it, let alone if five or six of these people die at the same time. Most series also don’t take their time to show proper aftermaths, which makes you wonder about the point of these deaths.
While I can’t consider this ending as the best one I’ve ever seen (that spot is filled by series such as Utena, Mouryou no Hako and Haibane Renmei), this was an excellent ending nonetheless. Like I hoped, it wasn’t focused at “ZOMG kill Zephys!”, but instead it was really focused at making Luna’s mother’s death have as big of an impact as possible. It formed a perfect closure to this series, and was miles away from the cheese that you usually see in endings like this. It didn’t drag nor was it too short, and it pretty much avoided any of the common pitfalls that endings usually have.
I’m not going to write a review for this series, since my experience has shown that I’m pretty bad at that with series that I watched over half a year ago. Still, overall, the 2003 series wasn’t as good as the 1998 series due to its rather weak first half, but it did have a much better main storyline compared to its predecessor, which especially made its final quarter a joy to watch. The 1998 series, in contrast was all about its characters, and therefore was downright awesome to watch in its first three quarters, especially when Gamigami Maou and his antics became involved.
I think what I liked so much about this ending is that it wasn’t a cop-out in any way… the ultimate evil that had to be sealed away was released, and the only way to defeat it again was to seal it away again, creating just as many problems as there were the FIRST time she was sealed away, and basically maintaining the status quo! You don’t see a lot of shows do that, and really, it’s the most sensical, logical way to end something like this, and carries with it some pretty hefty emotional content.
Glad you enjoyed the show (both shows, in fact), and thanks for blogging them! I also hope that by blogging them, you’ve convinced others to check them out as well, as I find both of these to be criminally underrated.
I regret that it took me so long to get these two episodes released, though. Sorry about that!
-Tom
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super interesting art; I know there’s games of this released as well but are the games based off the anime or vice versa?
Long story short, there are actually six games. The first three, on the PS1, deal with Pietoro and Narcia, and span the time from Pietoro’s 10th birthday through age 15. The fourth and fifth on the PS2, then, take place 15 years afterward. Pietoro is 30, and his son Pinon (the protagonist of this anime series) is 8. The anime is directly based off of these two games, but unlike the original PS1 trilogy, the PS2 games are pretty terrible, whereas the anime is superb (it takes the story of the PS2 games, and expands upon it significantly, featuring more characters, more character development, better story pacing, more fleshed-out plot details, etc.). As a result, I tend to think of the PS2 games as being pretty much obsolete… the anime is better in every way, and the games really aren’t very good to begin with, so there’s simply no reason to play them now that the anime exists.
The sixth game, BTW, was released on the PSP, and was meant to be a combination of the first and third PS1 games, with some new material sandwiched between them. Unfortunately, Sony saw fit to cut well over half the story of the original games, dumbing the whole thing down significantly and removing a lot of what made them special… and the game also suffers from numerous technical issues, such as wonky load times, graphical glitches, etc.
I’d say there’s no reason to play the PSP game either, except that there is: it’s available in English. It’s the ONLY PopoloCrois game available in English. And there’s still ENOUGH of the original PS1 games to make it worthwhile, if you can’t read Japanese… but there’s no denying that the PSP game is a pale shadow of the original titles it’s based upon, and if you get a chance to play the PS1 games, I highly recommend doing that OVER playing the PSP game.
-Tom