The final battle has come and Tamaki is able to truly rally her group.
What They Say:
The Guardians and Tamaki fight against an all-power Drei. In the heat of battle, one person will make the ultimate sacrifice.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With the Guardian’s fully awakened at this point and Tamaki having become the true Tamayori princess, they’re in a good place to do what needs to be done. Unfortunately, as much as Aria had her own plans, she’s been used in the grand scheme of things and Eins has now been taken down and Drei is in a position to get everything he wanted since most of it was his manipulations along the way. That lead to Aria’s surprise to be sure and has broken the whole of what she thought Logos was all about. Even though it’s been pretty obvious to the viewer for quite some time, it’s welcome to see it come together like this as it’s all finally ready for a true resolution.
Which, naturally, means a lot of fighting. While Aria and Vier try to take care of Eins, Tamaki and the others show up to insert themselves into the battle now. Drei, for his part, is certainly confident of his newfound power, claiming to be as powerful as a god. And revealing that he’s been alive for four hundred years and has bid his time and resources into acquiring all he needed to achieve his goal. With the power he has, it’s quite understandable that he’d want to gloat a bit even with the power that’s arrayed around him. His manipulations are laid clear and he has no issue in being the classic villain in making sure that everyone knows exactly what he’s done to them. It all just eggs them on the more to go against him, which is what powers him at the same time and makes him more dangerous.
Of course, the action dominates a decent chunk of the episode and we do get the noble sacrifice along the way to make things better for everyone, but even that’s a little stilted in the end. Everything goes big as the threat is nearly god-like, but it plays to the standard idea of a group working together for common cause and common heart is all you need, which isn’t a surprise. But it plays it out well with good animation and an appropriate build-up to it that works. And it also allows the epilogue section to give hope that there’s more story to tell, though it’s a bit more personal in a way because everyone isn’t bound like they were before. There’s a good sense of closure about things, but also plenty of things that it can expand upon as well, which makes sense since the manga is still ongoing. What it provides here though is a way to bring it to a close properly but to still make it clear that everyone’s lives are not simply over and everything will be easy from here on out.
In Summary:
Hiiro no Kakera rounds out its second and final season with a decent bit where it goes appropriately big and lets the villain show off his power and ability nicely. It also lets the main crew come together in total at long last and make a really strong push against him. It may be a bit short overall when you get down to it, but it feels better than a fight that’s dragged out over a couple of episodes. The series overall is one that I liked with what it did, but it faltered in the first season a bit with more drawn out conversational and mood pieces than warranted it. But it made up for it with some really appealing animation/design choices and some very well choreographed fights and interesting character choices with Tamaki. The second season felt like it was just too much at this point though and could have been done with a tighter and more condensed first season without losing much. The show has a lot of things that are worth checking out overall, but it does play to many tropes of the genre and the character types which offsets the positives.
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.
