Needs more Hachikuji.
What They Say:
The bee apparition is now gone, and summer vacation where the phoenix apparition averted harm is over– Around Koyomi Araragi and the girls who started a new trimester, apparitions, or perhaps threats even worse, were creeping in ever closer.
Tsubasa Hanekawa, Mayoi Hachikuji, Suruga Kanbaru, Nadeko Sengoku, Shinobu Oshino, and Hitagi Senjyogahara. Their soliloquies, confessions – and farewells. 6 new are starting now.
The Review:
When Araragi and Shinobu are caught in the middle of a ‘zombie’ horde, help comes in an unexpected form. Not so much the rain of rice that gets rid of them – that’s their weakness, apparently – but the person who throws it: Hachikuji, who’s very much still alive. Which puts her around 19 now, and in impressive enough shape to leave Araragi just about speechless. And she’s been expecting him, forewarned by a certain man in a Hawaiian shirt that he’d eventually show up – and who left instructions on how this world (or more accurately, this timeline) can be saved.
Three episodes of the arc meandering to this point, and suddenly it runs through its conclusion in no time at all, leaving me feel a little disappointed. Mainly because the brief meeting we get with still-alive Hachikuji – looking more Lara Croft than the little schoolgirl lost we usually see – just really isn’t enough. There’s a backstory to the young woman we see here that’s just begging to be told, but Araragi and Shinobu leave her behind all too quickly to go and face the real villain of the piece – Shinobu’s alter-ego from this timeline – and return the timeline to its proper state.
Not that dealing with Kiss-shot doesn’t make for visually-impressive entertainment. It does, and it delves into the inner thoughts of some of the characters here to a level that Monogatari hasn’t gone to before (and the series has dug pretty deep before – see Bakemonogatari‘s date episode). Kiss-shot is feeling despair, and the episode wants to make Araragi, Shinobu and the audience feel that as well. Which it more or less manages to do.
In Summary:
But, but… there’s so much more to the story of Elder Mayoi that I wanted to see, that doesn’t even really get touched upon, that I can’t help but feel disappointed, not for anything this episode does, but for the things that it doesn’t – presumably a lapse carried forward from the light novels, but no less annoying when it comes to the anime. A shame, and one that leaves this episode good as far as it goes, but ultimately lacking.
Content Grade: B+
Streamed By: Daisuki
Review Equipment: 27” Apple iMac, 2.9GHz Core i5, 32GB RAM, Mac OS X 10.8.4
