The world is saved and there is much rejoicing.
What They Say:
“Nobunagun”
Who is Jack the Ripper? Sio gets let in on the secret as Operation Stone Forest comes to an end. And then?
The Review: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
We’re still in the middle of the operation as we jump into this, the final episode. Jack the Ripper’s come to save Nobunagun, at the behest of his E-Gene’s voice. It only speaks when the world is in danger, and I guess Nobunagun is important to the world. She’s the main character after all.
There’s an interlude with a flashback to the real Jack the Ripper, who’s actually Florence Nightingale? The sequence is meant to idolize or immortalize Jack as a good guy, but it’s not necessarily needed. The good in the Jack the Ripper we see is in Adam Muirhead and that’s what we need to know. The idea that Jack the Ripper was working for a secret organization, removing unknown organisms from poor women cheapens the character. It’s also a little disturbing that they want to give rise to this serial killer.
The idea of Nightingale mode and Jack’s instinct to save himself were, in the end, much more interesting than anything else that was told. I didn’t especially care that Jack the Ripper was Florence Nightingale, I cared that Adam Muirhead was channeling his E-Gene, whoever that may be.
That aside, I actually quite enjoyed the ending. The culmination from the scared little girl Ogura Sio to badass fighting machine Nobunagun was genuine and I was cheering her on when she got to the brain of the battleship. She succeeded in having an entire arc, despite some of the offensive things the show made her do (like the entirety of episode three, the thing with the tentacles in the last two episodes, and the shower with Sukhe and Newton). Even the moments with Geronimo and her team culminate quite nicely, with Hunter getting some glory and everyone playing a role in the end. It’s what you like to see out of a shonen show that both entices and excites.
The last half of the episode was a disappointment, though, until the very last scene. It’s largely clean up and solves no questions that we had about the Evolutionary Invasion Objects of Dogoo. Everything returns to the status quo and, while it was fun, I wonder what the point of the entire show was at this point.
Now, I’m looking through some of the cast on Wikipedia and I see we missed out on a huge history lesson by not being introduced to some of these characters. Daizon of Tang, who lived in the 8th Century during the Tang Dynasty in China; George Hackenschmidt, a 20th Century strongman; Vincent Van Gogh; Mozart; Cesare Borgia; Nostradamus; and Alfred Nobel are among the cast listed. I’m sure nothing much would be done with them, but it’d be nice to see more than hints, since we did spend a lot of time meandering in this show.
In Summary:
In the end, I think I’m on the side of Nobunagun. But I also think it would have served better as a six or seven episode OAV instead of a full 13 episode show. The OAV would allow some better animation and more focus on the second squad, which we only got through Nobunagun and Jack the Ripper. It’d allow for cutting of the unnecessary and maybe that stupid training episode could be a bonus episode instead of smack in the middle. While the show has its flaws, and it has a multitude of flaws, I think its good parts outweigh the bad…that is if you just straight up skip over the bad parts.
Grade: A for the fighty bits, C+ for the rest of the episode
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Equipment: Radeon 7850, 24” Dell UltraSharp U2410 set at 1920 x 1200, Creative GigaWorks T20 Series II
