Bossun’s history becomes the new focus and his personal pain is explored.
What They Say:
One day, Bossun discovers a box of video tapes in his mother’s room. The videos show his young mother, a pretty woman named Haru, and a man who looks just like him…
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
While we’ve had some decent background material for both Switch and Himeko at this point, Bossun hasn’t had that much, though we’ve at least seen a little bit of his home life. With this two part storyline that starts here, we get a lot more about Bossun though as we see him out and about enjoying the day and spending some time with Akane. The two have a couple of mildly perilous moments that highlights his good guy nature pretty well but it’s something that puts him more on the path to discovery. Sometimes when you meet someone, it can open up the mind to being more accepting of things that start coming to the surface.
With the initial focus bringing things up to speed about the importance of a camcorder to Bossun, it goes back to when he was fourteen and discovered a camcorder in his house as well and found that there were quite a few tapes with it. And on those tapes are lots of silly videos involving his mother and her friend Ryunosuke. She has a pretty strong resemblance to Akane and there’s a certain cuteness in how Ryunosuke is a spitting image of Bossun himself. It’s easy to see what kind of view Bossun has of Ryunosuke since you can easily make the connection that he’s his father, someone his mother has never really talked about since the father left before he was born and she’s not wanted to talk about it at all in the years since.
Like can always be said, you never know what’s going on behind closed doors that will surprise you. Getting into the family history for Bossun and discovering what he does, it’s pretty interesting to see how he handles the truth about his parents since we know how he is in the present. The show does a decent if short form approach to his mother revealing the truth to him and it’s not as emotional as one might expect, but it does lead him to asking more questions and getting a better understanding of things. What you want to see more of is how it ends up affecting his relationship with his mother, though that’ll come later. There’s plenty of time to be explored in the past first with his parents and getting the first real glimmers of that here is pretty fun.
In Summary:
While each of the main characters of the series have a bit of personal pain and history that they’ve had to work through and deal with to be who they are now in the present, it’s good to see that in reality it hasn’t largely defined them here. The show deals with a couple of jumps here in where it wants to tell the story and it takes a bit longer than I’d care for to get to the real story that they want to tell here, but once it shifts to fourteen year old Bossun, or Yusuke as is his real name, it turns pretty interesting if a bit predictable. It doesn’t truly change your view of the character like it did with Switch, but it gives us an expanded look and should do a good deal for making his mother a much more compelling character as time goes on.
Grade: B
Readers Rating: [ratings]
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
