What I love about this show: the slow build-up. Every episode it slowly builds up tension and raises the stakes in the midst of all the slice of life. You could really see this in Steins;Gate as well, even though the characters there turned it into a completely different anime. It’s pretty much how a slow pacing should be done: this series feels slow because it’s building up, not because i’ts padding for time.
This episode brought in a lot of mystery by also involving a murder plot involving an anime production staff, in which Fraukojiro’s mother was the main suspect. The whole episode being overlaid with that children’s song that is very often used to create a creepy atmosphere. It worked really well at the climax of this episode. It’s also not like the tension of each cliff-hanger is completely useless: it carries on over the next episode, as shown with how much Subaru changed here now that his father got into the picture.
The dialogues in this show by the way are quite down to earth, and I like that a lot about it: it fleshes them out really well. This episode was just one string of dialogues between different people, and it was actually quite well balanced: it didn’t go on and on around one particular couple, and yet the dialogues were long enough to give some extra character to the ones involved.
Rating: 5/8 (Great)
which episode is this– it’s not in the title
I like how this episode showed a lot of Aki’s sister moments, showing her both full of hope, then cynical, then going back to when she was full of hope, etc… this without showing yet the inflection point when she changed. It’s also nice to get a glimpse of why Kai is so apathetic to effort and things in general.
The end of the episode was quite surprising (and scary at the same time).