Any efforts to increase the rice harvest will be wholly supported by Hideyoshi!
What They Say:
Hideyoshi loves rice; she can’t get enough of it. When she hears tale of a ritual that can be performed to guarantee a good harvest of rice, she decides she must do it. But what happens next takes her farther down the rabbit hole than expected.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With its focus on some of the lesser known names in the last couple of episodes, Sengoku Collection turns its focus to Hideyoshi this time around as we see her and her complete desire for rice that’s very overpowering. Hideyoshi gets to be brought into the series with a younger look about her as she’s pretty much a schoolgirl here, one that is quite proud of the way she’s the one that loves rice the most in all of Japan. It’s that love of rice that gets her into the most trouble though when, in a rather comical series of events, she pretty much literally falls down the rabbit hole into an Alice in Wonderland type situation.
Her dreamland adventure is pretty hilarious to watch unfold as everything is rice based when you get down to it, including human sized pieces of rice that talk with her and help her to enjoy quite a feast. She’s so completely into the whole thing that it’s just overpowering for her in a big way that she just revels in. But when she learns that it’s something that Nobunaga can access, it gets a little odd as there’s a cute discussion about how thise couldn’t possibly be real, though Nobunaga insists that it must be since she’s there. Hideyoshi’s pushback is utterly and completely adorable as they both discover they’re essentially in each others’ dreams at this point. While Nobunaga tries to be serious, it’s hard to do so with how cute and fun Hideyoshi is.
The journey the pair take in this dream/magical realm is definitely a fun thing to se unfold since it goes through a few different iterations of how they’re viewed. With it being dreamlike, it doesn’t adhere to real world designs a lot of the time and that leads to some great colors and backgrounds that come alive. The challenges they face there on their journey together does have a layer of threat to them, but it’s also something where you know nothing will really happen to them as well. It’s more just an interesting exercise in the surreal for the pair to go through and to let the animation team cut loose a bit since the show has been pretty real world based for much of it.
In Summary:
While there is certainly appeal to the episode with its surreal nature and the variety of the deamscape that they go through, it’s another episode that doesn’t feel like it works as well or in a similar enough way to the earlier episodes. The show does change things up by doing this and that is largely a positive, but I had gotten into the mold the first episodes created and the changes to it here don’t click quite as well for me. Part of it is also the characters used since they diverged to ones like Basho before. Hideyoshi manages to be a cute, younger character without being a completely annoying one so it wasn’t too bad of a choice here. Pairing her with Nobunaga for it also works well since it gives her more screen time than she’s had since the start. And while there’s some great visual work here, something about it feels like it falls a little flat.
Grade: B
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.
