Same matter cannot occupy the same space! Same matter cannot occupy the same space!!!

Impressions:

In this episode of Time Cop, the Space-Time Police have to escort a lost little girl home. Crap, I think I ran out of sarcasm partway through the first sentence. You get the gist. A younger/innocent version of Rika stumbles into the present time through one of Hanyuu’s shrines while playing hide and seek and it’s up to the rest of the Scooby Doo Gang to take care of her and find another one so she can go home. It was ostensibly focused on Hanyuu and her relationship with Rika, but since I don’t recall hearing a single hauauau, that doesn’t seem right at all. Tiny Rika also looks like a pumpkin stuck on top of a rake. Then the two Rika’s started ni-pahing at each other and I think something in my ear drum snapped.

Anyway, I think I’ve made my dislike for these melodramatic specials years after the show has already ended abundantly clear enough, particularly when most of the comedic ones are so much more amusing. Couldn’t they at least bring in some of the other characters from the Higurashiverse like Natsumi instead of trying to tack on sticky notes of character development after the fact? Well, at least the music was nice and it wasn’t the ugliest that a Higurashi OVA has looked. That award still belongs to the middle Rei ones where they spent nearly a minute slow panning over a shed.

Where’d all the fun go, Deen?

I really need to pay better attention to OVA schedules.

Impressions:

Meh. Again, just like the Magical Girl Rika episode, the problem here is that they’re not going far enough to actually make them work and the whole thing just ends up being completely lame. I guess they were trying to make this sort of touching with all the girls having flashbacks about heretofore unseen dates and whatnot with K-1 while tinkly piano music plays and they talk about how great he is, but… you know… some 60 or seventy episode in and about 8 after the story has concluded… we should be having fun here, not doing what would be blatant filler from some bad harem nonsense. Bring back the love magatama and make him swallow it or something. Put in a little more bloody effort to not be so damn bland.

And it’s even worse that Rika and Satoko’s ‘evil’ plan was so lame. They spent the whole thing building up and talking about how much fun it was while watching Rena touch herself in the bath (what else would she be doing in the bath with her hands between her thighs and thrashing around while thinking about K-1?). The fruition of all this build up? Blindfold him, spin him around, and point him at the group of ovulating girls to pick his girlfriend… and he picks out the Sonozaki grandma. Twenty minutes of buildup for that. Just that. Nothing else. Why, Deen? Why?

Preview:

Bobble heads.

You disappoint me, Deen.

Impressions:

Man, Deen. You know your comedy. In fact, sometimes I feel like that’s all that you know. This should have been so much better. It should have been actual parody for starters. Instead it’s just dull and easily the worst of all the comic Higurashi OVA episodes, if it even counts as such. It was also the worst produced of the comic ones too, which have so far boasted very good animation. Even after covering everything in a thick fog like it was an N64 FPS, it still looked pretty bad. I would have preferred to see more of the dream sequence at the start. At least there, Rika and Satoko have evolved into far more magical forms.

The real problem though was that everything was played almost completely straight. Rika remarks a few times about how ridiculous the whole magical girl schtick is, laments that she doesn’t get breasts when transforms, and zombie Ciel Chie throws curry around, but that’s it. It’s just the Higurashi characters superimposed upon an otherwise trite and cliche magical girl episode without overplaying any of the cliches or poking fun at it. Change the character designs and this could probably pass for an episode of Jewel Pet. I know you can be much funnier than this, Deen, often while trying to make a serious episode instead. Pull it together.

Preview:

High times with Shion.

Revenge is butts.

Not really sure what the deal with Dark Rabbit was today. Still not up in the usual area, and Niconico was over 30 minutes late to post their webcast with its irritatingly slow download speed and hardcoded subs so… meh!

Impressions:

See? Deen knows comedy. They need to stop all these attempts at drama and action and concentrate on their two core strengths, comedies and BL. Preferably the former, but hey, I can’t deny that they make bank off of every one of their cheap awful manlove shows. *ahem* As with the Rei OVAs, this part and at least the next are comedies before they get to… whatever. Does it really matter at this point? Anyway, this was mostly the perverted men Soul Brothers of the town thinking up appropriate punishments for the day when K-1 finally manages to come through and win one of their little games. I’m not sure how Takako and Ciel Chie got involved, but there they were. I notice that between Chie’s ass waving and Rika’s butt-window-scrub they’re all unusually focused on butts of girls with blue hair. Coincidence? I think not.

Anyway, it was fun. Like I said, Deen continues to actually know what they’re doing when it comes to comedy and parody. I don’t think it was quite as good as the comedy episodes of Rei, and it was also certainly much more poorly produced than them too, particularly with the fairly… sketchy art at times (just look at that hill in the OP!), but then I remember the two plot episodes of Rei were basically just an endless batch of stills. Hopefully we won’t be going there again, at least for magical girl Rika☆.  

Preview:

Magical girl Rika arrives.

HAUUuuuuuuuuuuuuuu~!

Impressions:

It was worth suffering through the last three episodes of godawful art, nonexistent animation, and pure wankery just for this. Hell, why didn’t they just make this the entire bloody Rei OVA? Between the magic pants and Daybreak, Deen’s shown themselves to be remarkably good at comedy and parody, but they seem enraptured with making silly faces instead. Oops, starting to get angry and bitter here.

This episode was hilarious from nearly start to finish and easily as good (if not better) than the first comedic episode of the Rei series. Rena’s rapidly flipping moods between murderous obsession and pure adulation were fantastic. They even managed to fit in a nice little emotional confession at the very end between Rena and K-1. Granted, I doubt we’ll see any more Higurashi from here out (although there’s still Natsumi’s story and they keep doing new chapters with every new port), so it doesn’t really mean much in the grand scheme of things, but it was a nice capstone to the series. I did think that the mah jong bit went on a little longer than it needed to, especially given that it was time that so could have been spent on more Takano/Rena cuddling, but that’s the biggest complaint I’m going to level at this one.

Brief Summary:

Hanyuu tells Rika that a magical whatsit has gone missing… a pair of magatama that makes the holder of the red fall madly in love with the holder of the white. Elsewhere, K-1 and Rena are enjoying cookies when they’re interrupted by Tomtake and Takano. After Tomitake teases them, Rena starts Hauhauing like a mofo and swallows something that fell from the sky. That night, Rika and Hanyuu track the magatama box to the junkyard, but the magatama are gone.

The next day, Rena’s lovesick as all get out and Rika explains about the magatama to the rest. Rena eventually runs off, and they follow to find her throwing herself at Tomitake. True true love. Rena eventually snaps and goes crazy at Takano, but then declares she’s taking Tomitake home and wants to know what nurse outfit she should wear for him. Takano storms off and the kids attack Tomitake, but can’t find the white magatama (protip: Note who was searching his pants). Rena’s also disappeared in the confusion.

Takano’s suddenly ambushed by Rena, who cozies up to her and wants to call her "onee-sama" and be her everything. She snaps a little but, but goes back to lovey lovey mode just before the kids arrive. Takano changes her mind and accepts Rena’s love. Mion accidentally lets slip that the white magatama is important, so Takano refuses to give it up and goes skipping off, leaving Rena to take care of the opposition before she goes merrily skipping off as well.

Having lost both of them, the kids go to Rena’s hideout and find mah jong books all over the place. They head to the mah jong parlor and find Rena snuggling Oishi. He won’t give up the ‘lucky’ magatama either, so K-1 joins with Akasaka against the Reina/Oishi Love Love Team to defeat them. Despite Hanyuu’s failed attempts at cheating (because she’s a nimrod), K-1, Mion, and Akasaka use their magical telepathy to pull off the win… and then K-1 swallows the white magatama when Oishi drops it.

Rika takes them back to the shrine to deal with it properly. Rika tells K-1 that it may just be the magatama’s power, but she felt her heart skip a beat when he said he’d save her earlier, and that she really really loves him. The next day, Tomitake and Takano are fighting over who gets Rena. Rika explains that’s the real curse of the magatama.

This was a bloody disgrace.

Impressions:

Man, what a godawful arc this has been. This episode literally takes place in two rooms and is just an endless parade of exposition from start to finish. I only included 44 caps because when I went through the MPlayer dump, that was what I came up with on the first pass. Most 24 minute episodes, I end up with somewhere between 70 and 100 or so on the first pass. For a 30 minute episode, I ended up with 44. There was literally absolutely nothing to see here, so I’m putting my foot down… and you can still see the constant and blatant reuse. 

They could have done the entire first half of the episode using nothing but recycled art from the last episode, and that one was awful too. Honestly. If they’re not going to animate BLOODY ANYTHING, then what’s the point of even having an ANIMATED adaptation? At least if you play the game, you’ll get the full story. Here, you get margnally better (but still static) art, and a mangled half-assed version of the story that does its damnedest to sidestep the central conflict at every single opportunity. Freakin’ great.

At least the preview for the final Daybreak episode looked entertaining enough. Not that I care all that much about that story aside from the memories of water-gunning down punks back when the real Daybreak came out, but it is back to the silliness, which has been the only redeeming part of Rei so far. There was also more animation in that 30 second preview than there was in the other 1770 seconds of this episode.

Preview:

Rena Does Hinamizawa.

Going nowhere slowly.

Impressions:

Well, if you were hoping for nothing but a nearly word for word retelling of this arc with about 5 minutes worth of animation spread out across a 30 minute episode, then I have good news for you. For everybody else, this episode was dull to the extreme. We rehashed the whole "this isn’t Rika’s world" about three times over the course of the episode with the only real development coming at the end when it’s revealed that the shard that changed everything is the fact that Rika’s mother is Oyashiro’s incarnation instead of Rika. And it only took us 27 minutes to get there. And even during that, they reused the same animation of her mother hugging her three times in a row. Way to push the borders of OVA production quality, Deen.

It wasn’t all bad or rehashed dialogue though. Rika also beat Satoko with a chair. That was entertaining. The episode could have used more of that. There were probably also as many frames of animation used during that scene as the entire rest of the episode combined. Aside from that, it was literally 30 minutes of static talking heads, pretty much every single one of them saying "this world’s pretty good, okay?" At least next episode, where Rika actually has to make a decision and follow through on it, should be more interesting, if a bit preachy at the end.

Preview:

Dreams.

Not a promising start to the serious side of Rei.

Impressions:

What an abysmal episode. Maybe it’d be better if you knew absolutely nothing about the plot of this particular arc, but the entire thing was spent on setting the premise. 30 minutes of "nothing went wrong," closely followed by Rika saying "this isn’t right… nothing went wrong!" Everything in this episode could have been covered in about 5 minutes instead of six times that. Hell, I covered the contents of this episode in the previous sentence. The remaining 29 minutes and 45 seconds of the episode are just listing the bullet points and reminding you why each little bit was important to the ‘real world,’ but can be summed up as "no Hinamizawa syndrome." You can safely skip this episode now and wait for the next one which will hopefully have something a little more interesting than "They’re alive in this world! Gadzooks! Nii-paah!"

Sadly, after the rather well done silly episode, the production for the more serious side was horrible. I can only take so many closeups of Rika’s eyes before flipping on the TV and wondering which crazy person Jack McCoy is prosecuting this time. Endless parades of talking heads are bad enough, but most of the dialogue here was Rika monologuing, so it was just watching unmoving heads. Re(i)na and Rika walking through the field also got dragged out far too long for my tastes with absolutely nothing of note happening visually. Hopefully next episode will get at least a little more interesting as Rika loses her mind a bit more instead of just narrating the premise.

Preview:

Rika and her mother.

Auuuuuuuuuuu~

The OVA’s been out for about 24 hours and I’m tired of waiting for a decent source. You’ll survive.

Impressions:

A very enjoyable, albeit extremely silly little episode about Keichi acquiring a magical swimsuit that turns out to be cursed and his harem’s attempts to strip him naked. I especially enjoyed the recruiting of the other characters through the middle, though really could have done without the otaku erection joke, followed by them stuffing cameras in their speedos. Ciel Chie in particular had the parody running particularly thick. I do wish that there had been a bit more Hanyuu, but more hauauau would make anything and everything better. It did lose a little bit of steam at the end by dragging out the soul brothers soru buraddas stuff and the naked K-1 joke at the end for about a minute longer than it needed to, but overall, it was a lot of fun.

If you’re expecting anything actually Higurashi-ish (I’m not even certain what that means), you’re not going to get it until the next OVA. This was just pure silliness plus fanservice. Not that there’s anything wrong with that since we’ve moved away from the creepy art of the first season. Mion clearly had the best swimsuit, with the china dress style going for her, but it was more than a little creepy to see K-1 gawking over Satoko and Rika. So long as we’re talking about Sonozaki fashion, man that was a surprisingly ugly bikini. Sadly, we didn’t get to see Hanyuu’s swimwear. Hauu~

Higurashi Rei OP

Preview:

And back to slicing and dicing.

Jessica ♥ ♥ ♥

While I found this song to be a bit lackluster compared to the previous one, the video itself is better. This team has come a long way since HMG vol. 1. As for the content, it is centered around George x Shannon and Battler vs. Beatrice (as expected), with a few Jessica shots to keep me entertained.

Don’t forget to get the wallpapers while watching the clip.

EDIT: Updated embedded video to a higher quality version.

ps. I’d hit it.

Aroduc Edit:
Man, if you keep posting, I’ll have to add the author delineator back into the header.