Training continues, but touches from the past continues to haunt Misaki.
What They Say:
Continuing to train in preparation for the national tournament, Aichi and the others notice Misaki’s incredible memory. Aichi and Kamui are all excited to learn how to have such great memory ability, but…
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
In a case of too little, too late, we start to get a little bit of background information on Misaki. Flsahbacks and thoughts of her parents from when she was young, highlighting how something went terribly wrong, are permeating her thoughts at the moment now that the intensity of the regionals has come and gone. It’s the kind of thing where once you start to think about it, it’s in your mind constantly thereafter and you can’t shake it. So when she’s at the card shop and playing a match against Aichi, she keeps making poor plays and doing unusual attacks and defenses that don’t make much sense. Aichi keeps trying to read into it with what she’s doing, thinking it’s some kind of grand strategy, but it may not be that because of her distraction over events in the past.
Throughout the game play, you have this kind of back and forth between the two with the card shop owner wondering what’s going on with her as she makes these unusual plays. Misaki has brief flashes a couple of times of the younger days and throughout it we get a better feel for her when it comes to how she has a perfect recall memory, which has everyone wondering why she’s not an even better player than she is because of it. But she hates using it and even thinking about it because it all goes back to when she was a child and her own involvement in the card games as a little girl because of her parents. It’s fairly obvious what’s going on from the beginning of the episode, and there’s a nice little tie to the shop owner that makes you smile because it expands on the bond between them just a bit more. It all adds a bit more meaning to the shop and to Misaki herself.
It also makes Misaki the most fleshed out character of the series and it only took twenty-four episodes to get one of these. We’ve had small moments with other characters, but they’re very minor overall and certainly not to what they did here. But even this isn’t a huge event when compared to some other shows, because it’s easy to believe that they’re largely going to ignore it from now on besides a mention here and there once they bring it to full resolution. But this really falls into the category of too little, much too late.
In Summary:
In all honesty, I’m really surprised I lasted this long with the series. It’s one that has only the faintest hints of actual characters as it spends most of its time just being about the game itself and the cards. There is something to be said for that to some degree, but without interesting characters and personalities to back it up, it simply doesn’t connect well for the viewer. I’ve watched lots and lots of shows about kids this age in anime before and in all sorts of situations, from light and funny to dark and serious, but this one has almost nothing to latch onto with the characters. The heavy focus on the card play is an obvious angle since it’s been made to promote the game, but it never rises above being just that. Promotion. And that’s unfortunate because it could have some potential and they could have done something interesting with it. I do like that they tried to play it straight for the most part and not make it some huge otherworldly kind of show with the cards as the focus, but they failed on actually making it engaging beyond the card play. And the card play simply isn’t gripping material. And twenty-four episodes is more than enough to prove it to me.
Grade: B-
Simulcast 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.
