Let’s get serious – at a beach!
What They Say:
Kurosu has sent Himea, Taito, Gekkou, Mirai, and Izumi, the newest member of the Miyasaka High School student council, to a sunny beach with a barrier to keep away trespassers. Kurosu plans to train the members on their combat abilities. And then the exhausted members are dealt one last blow when faced with Izumi’s cooking.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Give them some credit, it’s episode eight and we’re just now hitting a beach. Someone must have a graph somewhere that shows when a series introduces particular episodes like the beach, school festivals and so forth that are seemingly common in almost every show. Like other shows that attempt to use a beach theme, the intent is to bring everyone together there for some hard training to deal with what they’re facing. This time they at least take some decent precautions with a barrier to surround them so they’re not disturbed, which makes it harder to certain kinds of silliness to occur as well as keeping away curious onlookers that would ogle the girls.
Kurosu continues to be one of the more eye-roll inducing teachers I’ve seen in recent memory since even with what’s going on, it’s not exactly something that would happen in a fashion sense. Small things like that do tend to bother me these days as I think it’d be more interesting to give us a normal looking teacher giving them the training rather than someone elaborate like this. He’s had his run in with Gekkou and that makes it easier to get everyone into the training mode, not that it goes easily. There’s a lot of non-training moments that filter into this as well with threats seemingly going around in all ways between people, especially some very dark looks between Kurosu and Himea.
A bit of action does factor into the episode as well as Kurosu has let them know that a wyrm is in the area as well, and it’s something that they should be able to handle without any problem. The training side of it once it does get going gets pretty dark and with the visual style of the show it works well since it’s all heavily hued in purples. It gives it a very distinct look, but the main issue keeps coming back to the forefront in how disjointed the show has been so far and the lack of really caring about the characters much because of it. The introduction of Kurosu hasn’t helped and the new student council member in Izumi is pretty weak here overall as well. You can see the point of it all, but it’s just kind of there and it takes some odd turns to actually go through it all.
In Summary:
With every episode, A Dark Rabbit Has Seven Lives continues to slowly push me away from enjoying it. I can’t say it started strongly, but I found a lot of appeal in its designs and potential premise. But as we’ve gotten to know the flimsy characters that inhabit the series, and added more along the way, it’s missed out in actually making a connection for the audience because of how it skips around and the number of characters. It’s not a huge cast, but the supposedly central characters of Taito and Himea often feel like secondary characters and that Gekkou is the real lead. And with one like this, it’s more Kurosu that’s the lead than anything else. For a training episode, it’s very weak on that aspect and focuses more on the tension between various characters which is alright, but overall feels lacking.
Grade: C
Streamed By: Nico Nico
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.