And with this, we’ve pretty much abandoned the episodic nature of this series and are heading off to the finale where everything will come together, even though we’ve still got to wait for the preview movie to explain everyone’s backgrounds.
There is some serious potential for the ending of this series. At this point we already know that the writers of this show are just terrific: in terms of storytelling. Along with Hyouge Mono and Penguin Drum, we’ve got three upcoming endings who really have the potential to become amazing. There is a very big but here though.
Simply: Bettenou will either make or break this finale. I say this because she has some really good points, but also some bad points. The good points turn her into one of the most interesting villains around: the mystery around her. it’s a very neat idea to have the main villain of a show be a master of illusions, who can even bend those illusions into reality. Because of this, there was no way of knowing what was real. This was a very paranoid episode, because how much of it really happened? When this was revealed, it made all the more impact.
At the same time though, all we got to see of her was a bunch of random images. Heck, did she even speak yet? At the moment she’s only being fleshed out through her illusions, and the people’s reactions around her. This worked really well for Kaishou in this episode: as a side-villain he rocked. Again you don’t know exactly what his motives are, but there are a ton of possibilities with this guy. This show may not spend time fleshing out its characters, but it found some very interesting alternatives to still have a memorable cast by forcing us to read between the lines about them. As for Bettenou though, will that work as well? We’ve seen so little about her. Hiding a villain until the end is very tricky to pull off right. Blood-C pulled it off, but there the main villain’s air was all over the series. Un-Go is different and Beauteou is only one of all the different villains who all have hardly anything to do with each other.
It’s going to be important to bring everything together, and show the power of a conclusion of a semi-episodic series. Bring both the setting and characters to a new level, while retaining the same sense of storytelling that made the previous episodes so good.
Rating: ** (Excellent)