Short Synopsis: Ran&co win a trip to a tropical island and lots of toilet paper.
Highlights: Nothing really new here…
Overall Enjoyment Value: 6/10 (Solid)
One thing that’s always bugged me with this anime is how as a mystery-series, it never really tries to hide its bad guys: so far, they’ve all got the bad guy evil-grin. I mean, this series is fun enough while exploring why they’ve got such an evil grin, but a bit more ambiguity on the scale between good and bad definitely WOULDN’T HURT. I mean, the bad guy in this episode would have made for a pretty interesting character, if his expression didn’t scream out “Evil!”. Thankfully, the creators realized that and wasted no time in establishing that he’s possessed by an evil snake.
There’s another thing that’s bugging me: this series is about to run out of episodes. Right now, it’s taken two episodes per volume, there are nine volumes and it’s currently doing the seventh one. If it were to continue with this pace, it’d run out of stories by episode 22, so how are the creators planning to fill its final four episodes? I imagine that it’s going to be some more original stories, but I hope that they’re going to be better than the first wave of original stories. They weren’t necessarily bad, but thinking back, they were the least memorable of the stories in this series. Since the original novels didn’t seem to have one big conclusion, ideally, those four episodes should focus on the development of Ran, Rui and Midori. I hate to say it, but none of them really developed through the series. Thankfully the creators have made up for it by fleshing the cast out really nicely, but I’d still like to see some sort of development at the end.
Nevertheless, this arc again promises to deliver a solid story, although perhaps not the best. It’s another building-up episode where the real meat will take place in the next episode, and in the meantime we get to enjoy some nice slice-of-life scenes as Ran and the others enjoy the island, known as Snake Island. The most interesting is of course that snake-spirit: what does it have to do with that shell Ran found, why does it stick to that evil guy and are the snake we see in the flashback and the snake around the evil guy the same snake?
