What They Say:
Kou comes to a certain city, in search of his older brother Takumi, who ran away from home and disappeared. Thinking it’d be rather difficult to find his older brother, Kou decides not to go back until he finds him… but he ends up finding him immediately. However, when Kou is reunited with Takumi, he had become the head of the Mikuni Detective Agency. Takumi appears to have no intentions to go back home. Kou then decides that if his older brother isn’t going to come home, he’s going to stay at the Mikuni Detective Agency.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Reworking the series as a school based drama for its final episode isn’t a surprise as the show has had some fun doing various kinds of reimaginations over its entire run. This one goes with all the usual tropes as Kou plays the straight man for it and goes through the series of events with the various girls, at least until he realizes that they’re all pretty scary in their own ways – and several of them are male characters at that. Putting Kou through this kind of process is amusing and there’s a number of quick hit gags that work as it does the whole gal games thing and does it in some really bizarre ways, especially when they pull the sword from the stone. Within the three minute run time, we get a lot of different and weird situations hitting as well as plenty of cross-dressing.
In Summary:
Shin Strange+ is just as uneven in its final episode as it has been for its entire run and that doesn’t surprise me in the least. Similar to the first season, there are some great gags and moments throughout it, but a lot of it just falls short. The bigger problems from the first season were largely resolved though in that the stories here felt like they had more structure rather than just forced random gags and that helped to make it a lot more enjoyable. This episode simply runs with the dream sequence stuff and has fun with it as a Strange+ Memorial episode with game gags and more. It’s cute, silly and utterly fluffy and forgettable.
Grade: C
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Apple TV via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
