Love means never having to say "Ow, ow, you’re choking me."

I think you should actual get demerits if you understood that reference.

Impressions:

Man, Zexcs. This stuff sounds much better on paper I’m sure than you’re making this end up. How else do you have an episode with dark gods, magic arms, naked princesses, and ninjas end up so lame? After the cliffhanger last week, the conclusion to Lyner going berserk was just a three minute morality speech from Ferris about how Lyner’s not a monster. Are these things mandated by law from every single female associated with Lyner? I guess that means that Milk’s is coming up in about three episodes with Sion’s probably forming the big finale. He is a female, right? Then that side of the story isn’t seen until the very end where they get a sidequest to go save a kid whose Alpha Stigma awoke. Maybe they can finally address the whole "Alpha Stigma = Evil" thing that they’ve been having issues with thus far.

The remaining 15 minutes of the show was consumed suffocated by the usual Sion lameness and laziness. They shoud have spent a lot more time on Noa and Claugh and less on Miran dicking around or generic talk about more rebellious elements. Your side doesn’t have an antagonist, Sion. Nobody cares. Your story is the war against the bourgeoisie equivilent of Whack-A-Mole. They also should have actually shown Claugh’s fight with the assassins holding Noa’s entire entourage hostage instead of cutting away and giving the wrapup. Again, ninjas, magic arm, naked princess. Focus on that, don’t skip over it, dammit.

Preview:

Good, Milk. Now kick him in the balls and boot his can off the show.

I almost wish he had a top hat and cape.

Impressions:

Like the last few episodes, Shiki is finally getting interesting, but it’s doing so by hurtling in bizarre directions. If you were hoping for a resolution to last week’s cliffhanger, tough beans. About half of this episode was Toshio and Ozaki just sitting around listing every single banal piece of data on the vampires. I hope you want to know exactly how much blood they drink, that they can’t enter unless invited, and their favorite color because you’re going to get them. Knowing every single piece like that just makes it harder to understand how they never came to the conclusion that it was vampires in the first place, or at least had someone stay up/monitor the patient overnight when everything was going wrong with them. And of course, after both seeing a vampire, their course of action is to sit around and wait for another night. Unarmed. Without asking for any backup or help. Great work, team.

The other half was more interesting, but similarly inane. The vampires launched an all out attack on the clinic, broke in, beat Ozaki up, and with a cry of "Vampires away!" all then ran off because it would ruin the plot for the bad guys to take out the protagonists after going to all the trouble to introduce themselves. All this to pick up a woman one of them had been gnawing on. Seriously, after two months of build up, the big ‘reveal’ that there really are vampires comes with one of them showing up and saying "Hi! We’re vampires!" Catboy also seems to have been hitting the gym pretty hard lately, or the animators forgot how to draw arms.

Regardless though, it was another step in the right direction for the show. It’s just continuing to have issues making the entire show interesting instead of just the supernatural portions. It does atmosphere well, it does not do exposition well, which makes its stubborn insistence on spending 2/3rds of every episode spewing out as much of it on the most trivial of details all the more confusing.

When in doubt, add a catboy.

Impressions:

On one hand, the plot this week was so insultingly bad that I think it may have given me hepatitis. On the other hand, the narrator was only severely irritating this week instead of infuriating and they’re actually addressing the plot again after two whole months of dicking around. JCStaff gets a special award for particularly horrific writing by trying to sell Reiko as a defector from Shirou’s camp. Is she evil? Let’s see? We’ve seen her for 15 seconds previously where she was smirking and laughing in desire to crush the protagonists. Therefore, she must be telling the truth about everything to the good guys! Let’s drag this out for half the episode wondering about it! The only way her ‘turn’ could have been more obvious is if they had "villain" stamped on her forehead. I’m glad they’re actually going to get to the plot, but there should have been a purpose behind it, not the villains sitting on their ass for 75% of the show before suddenly erupting in a string of kidnappings to drag all the protagonists to their home base. I can’t wait to hear whatever cockamamie reason they cook up for this one. I seriously hope it’s "The show’s ending, and you weren’t doing anything, so I had to create some conflict."

Meanwhile, Ryoshi’s off screwing around with some random Spaniard based on Puss in Boots. Maybe he’s part of Sheephead’s master plan too, who knows? If he is, then ‘training’ Ryoshi makes no sense and you’d think he’d have been a part of the giant panover of Shirou’s plan coming together at the end. If he’s not, then he’s the most bizarre training plot device since Goku went into a super gravity time compression mega freezord ultra chamber. "Hi, I’m a Spanish catboy, and I’m here to train you to fight because I. Am. Fabulous." Why not just give Ryoshi a magical fairy and let him fly off to NeverNever Land to train? Also for that matter, since when does Ryoshi know jack about martial arts? He has a slingshot. That’s his whole deal. Not hitting things, hiding in trees and whining.

Finally, I question JCStaff’s need to loop Otsu’s breasts bouncing as their post-ED interstitial. Seriously, JCStaff? Seriously?

Also, I’m aware of the existence of PRISM Generations, but since the thing is 12 minutes long, of which about 10 minutes are topless girls running around in the bath (and the remainder of the time Magical MANLY MEN), I think I’ll just leave you to discover that particular den of iniquity on your own.

Word to your mother.

Impressions:

Just like I feared. A-1 is bound and determined to piss away episodes on random nonsense. This arc is about a snow girl ghost that Chihiro accidentally summons, and since the Scooby Gang can’t ever leave anything alone, they have to spend two episodes resolving it. At least Uchida seems to have washed his hands of it and would rather sit around and make doe-eyes at Mikaze. I never thought that I’d applaud him for doing anything, even if he did apparently throw his giant stack of papers into a fountain off-screen. I also question how Maya was a skeptic when part of the school curriculum is apparently raising the dead and not a single person bats an eye. Still better than the deus ex machine, but after 9 episodes, it sure would be nice if they stopped rewriting the universe. Chupacabres and mothmen? Too dangerous for the public to know about. Afterlife machines and raising the dead? Let’s teach classes on them. Yeah, great.

The episode was better than most of the introductory arc episodes for this show though and JK had some good moments, but just like most of the series, it was completely squandered time on a literally fabricated trivial thing. Maybe even moreso since it obviously has nothing to do with the plot and it promises to drag out another episode. That means that Kozue’s arc and the big conclusion will have had about the same amount of focus. And that’s assuming that they actually get back to the plot in a couple episodes. Way to prioritize, A-1. Maybe you should have focused on something smaller than THE APOCALYPSE, FIRE AND BRIMSTONE OVER THE LAND, PLAGUES OF ALIENS, DOOMSDAY FOR MANKIN if you wanted to dick around on Scooby Doo mysteries for 75% of the show. It didn’t have too much melodrama from the protagonists at least, particularly in the face of Akari’s generic-as-hell sob story, although I certainly could have done without them literally sitting down around the table to give Akari’s past in one big dump. Is storytelling really that so difficult that you have to just toss up a talking head to lay everything out?

Preview:

Akari’s death and resolution.

The King Game isn’t played nearly enough in anime.

Impressions:

I’ve always had a soft spot for the King Game ever since Galaxy Angel introduced me to it long ago and it ended with Milfeulle awakening Mint’s tongue twister super sayajin powers. Plus, it’s sort of similar to my favorite drinking game, at least the way we play it with  The entire premise just has so much potential for misdirects and silliness that I’m surprised comedy anime doesn’t abuse it more. Then again, if they did, maybe I’d get tired of it. Anyway, this was a lot of fun, even though some of the stuff was pretty predictible. Himeji should just give up and make out with Minami already, for the good of all. I also wonder where some of those pictures that Yoshii forced them to burn came from. He’s been crossdressing a rather lot offscreen.

I like how the other one is trying to flee.

Impressions:

Apparently Saeko was killed by the zombies last week and they introduced her identical twin off screen, because this character and the one seen in the last eight episodes have practically nothing in common. She was prancing around without pants not two episodes ago without caring. Now she’s ashamed to be seen slightly wet? What? Did I miss a memo somewhere? That said, this was easily the least T&A-full episode of this show to date. Sure, that means that there aren’t quite as many talking points as last week, but I consider it a win for good taste. A shame that didn’t mean better animation though. I guess it was about average, but every single action scene was plagued with bad stills every 5 seconds.

Unfortunately though, that meant a return to the insultingly bad writing. After picking up their awesome little ATV, the first thing Takashi does is drive it into the river, wait until night, then drive it through zombies while they can barely see, before abandoning it in a fountain so they can continue on foot. Is the value of running over zombies lost on them? Remember way back when in episode 2 when they learned the zombies ignore them if they don’t make a lot of noise? What ever happened to that strategy? Saeko then has a sudden attack of angst from child zombies that would have been more compelling if A.) It hadn’t been introduced and resolved within a four minute span, most of which was stills with her giving a voice over and B.) Not solved by being violently groped. Also, it’s heavily implied that they kissed after their mutual confession of being sadistic. I thought kisses were supposed to resolve all Japanese feminine angst. Have you been lying to me all these years, Japan?

Preview:

Angry nudes.

Stellar performance there.

Impressions:

Yet another transitioning episode that’s hard to say anything intelligent about because absolutely nothing happens. The whole thing could have been skipped by just having Tsukiumi and Musubi show up in the first couple minutes and nothing of particular value would have been lost except for Horie Yui as the Sekirei of Domestic Abuse. That could have certainly been more subtle. It doesn’t help that she has almost the exact same design as her Kampfer character too. I also have to wonder how exactly they’re keeping this Sekirei plan a secret when one of them is carrying a giant hammer through a hopital and the city streets.

It was a little more watchable than the last couple since they were focusing on showing some different Sekirei/Ashikabi relationships instead of giant dumps of exposition, but Seven Arcs still isn’t living up to what it could be doing here. At least after all the waffling around, we’re finally getting back to some action next week. I’m still not sure how exactly that’s going to lead into whatever ending they have planned for it. Seven Arcs should really just take this series and run. The best part of this season so far has been the completely original mini-arc at the start. Let’s have more of that and less mopeyness already. Hell, Minato was even kind of manly back then. Now he’s just… Yukimura. Good lord, I’m in bizarro world here.

Preview:

Uzume vs the team.

I think the staff here got high and listened to classical this week.

The first two versions of Sekirei PE 9 I tried to watch self-destructed into codec errors about 14 minutes in, so I guess we’re going with Mitsudomoe first today.

Impressions:

Well, I’m glad that they only spent one of the six segments on the usual misunderstanding gags and played around witht he presentation by having one segment be essentially unvoiced and the ED Swan Lake, but unfortunately, none of it turned out particularly well. I’m sick of the super heroes = sex jokes, but they need to do more than just mix up the presentation a little bit while still relying on the same jokes ad nauseum. It didn’t really feel creative, so much as they realized that the segment had no meaningful lines so they stuck some classical music over it to try to be creative. There were a few good moments, but most was pretty blatantly telegraphed or not even a joke. Mitsuba goes to Yabe’s room, complains about there being no food, eats all of it. SEGMENT OVER. That’s the kind of ‘joke’ I expect to be done over the preview for the next episode, not as part of the actual episode.

Chiba was probably the top performer of the episode, particularly with his immediate toss of Mitsuba’s kiddy panties as soon as he got them. They could be doing a lot more with Satou too, even though a lot of his stuff seems pretty forced. Why exactly did he look like that if he was focused on his kite again? They never did say what exactly he was going to do with the kite once he got it. The whole Santa thing was also entirely too drawn out to be particularly funny. Make the joke and move on. Do not repeat the same joke eighteen times in a row, especially when it’s something as basic as "blinded person runs into an object.

Preview:

Preview text goes here

Okay, Basara, this is past the line.

Impressions:

Well, this was miserable. Most of it was Keiji bumming around whining about how Hideyoshi has gone evil. Then some more of Yukimura in way beyond his 2nd grade reading level before Keiji’s monkey gets sick which leads into a whiny flashback showing how evil Hideyoshi is. Get this. He killed some guys that wanted to attack him when he and Keiji were already beaten up by someone else. Soooooooo evil. Those people were probably actually puppies. Made of candy. And orphans. With sick mothers. That walk uphill both ways to school through the snow. I’m not even certain anybody even dies in this damn universe anymore now that Motochika is back in perfect health after a two episode break. That battle really bloody mattered then, didn’t it? The rate at which they’ve revived ‘dead’ or severely wounded characters in the last couple episodes is approaching mindboggling.

So yeah, nothing to this episode but talking heads. It looked slightly less cheap than last week’s snoozefest, but they didn’t even try to half-ass any action either. Also, remember when Sasuke and Kasuga were members of this show? And part of the plot wasn’t "Keiji’s monkey has a fever?" I miss those days. At least next week appears to have some action, although I’m not sure how much anybody will care about Motochika jobbing to Masamune. I wonder if episode 11 will be Motochika respawning for a third time out of nowhere to take on Yukimura. At the rate this show is going, I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest.

Preview:

Motochika versus protagonist. I wonder who’s going to win.

Screencaps may appear funnier than the episode actually is.

Yeah, yeah. I’m allowed to sleep in until noon sometimes too.

Impressions:

A very dull episode. The first half was the usual skipping around from morning to sunset to noon to morning again, and the second half was the most tired and cliche jokes about sports festivals imaginable told at an absolute snail’s pace. Which isn’t to say that the first half was moving along either. Both the "Suzu is short yet again" joke and the cat thing were dragged out to hell. They even missed the completely obvious gag about Suzu being too short to break the finishing tape. At least that would have been something I haven’t seen eight thousand times before. I am amazed that they didn’t do a cavalry battle though. I thought that was law for any show containing an athletics festival.

George was probably the highlight of the episode, but that’s really not saying much. The show even ran out of material and had to spit out another random parody to fill up the last couple minutes… again. You know that things are bad when they completely abandon the kind of humor they’ve been using the entire run to just dump the characters into a straight scene from another genre to hope for a cheap laugh… again. You have to overplay those parodies if you want them to be funny, not just paste your character’s heads over someone else’s body and then throw George in at the end of it.

Preview:

Maids and fellating bananas.