It’s the final episode! Just kidding!
What They Say:
Racing heartbeat and expanding fantasies… After being accepted to her dream school, Stella Girls’ Academy, Yamato Yura is excited to begin her high school life. “Maybe, at this school, I can change!” Then, when she lies down to rest after moving into her dorm, her hopes still high… she finds a Desert Eagle under her pillow! High school girls?! The C³ Club?! A survival game?! A new youth survival story is about to begin!
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Okay, so I’m pretty sure the entire Internet had agreed that this series would be a total of 12 episodes, and I had no reason to think otherwise throughout the entirety of this episode. But then the ending was followed up by… a next episode preview. So yeah, apparently this isn’t the end. But it sure feels like it, and it looks like the actual “final episode” will be little more than a bonus episode usually reserved for home video releases.
That might not be a bad thing, though, because the “plot” of this series isn’t the most impressive. As mentioned, this episode is in every way a finale, and it plays out just as expected given that assumption. Yura shows up for one last survival game with Sono-chan, and the rest of the gang gets involved in it to have a grand old time together just like they used to. It’s a lot more pleasant to just watch them having fun with this passion that they’ve shared over the course of the series than wallow in angst like they have been for far too long now, but when there’s largely no connection between one and the other, it makes much of what’s come before this point feel rather cheap and wasteful. Yura never acknowledges any of what’s happened, although she shows regret that some of the others can accurately interpret, and none of them do either. This is obviously somewhat intentional to show that they can put the past behind them to come together and have fun again, but it really seems like someone would be asking a question at some point. Since Yura’s reason for completely solving all of her problems was due to her magical hallucinations, it wouldn’t seem like she could really explain herself, but then she makes everyone see her hallucinations in this episode and they seem pretty fine with that, so who knows? I’m fine with something a little more metaphysical in my fiction, but in a slice of life high school series, it seems like having things make sense isn’t too big a favor to ask. What the extent of this final hallucination is remains unclear, as they don’t actually show any of the implied “war” anyway.
While the one game they do show is fun for the most part (the enjoyment level depends a great deal on your patience, because it goes on for an awful long time), the fact that it’s hardly animated puts a bit of a damper on that. Gainax is obviously not what they once were, and their curse of all their talented staff going off to form new studios is becoming more severe as time goes on. For this property, the production committee didn’t seem too keen on putting in too much money (not that I’m surprised they didn’t consider it the most deserving), as the “battle” sequences, no matter how exciting they’re supposed to be, have ended up being little more than successions of still frames with occasional simple (and often repetitive) animations thrown in.
In Summary:
In this surprisingly penultimate episode, the real finale to the plot is carried out, and it’s about what you might expect from the way the previous episode ended. It doesn’t really live up to all the (admittedly rather trite) despair prevalent in the chunk of episodes before this, but hey, it’s a very entertaining episode if you’re ready for a very long and barely animated game of toy guns!
Grade: C
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Toshiba Satellite L655-S5191 PSK2CU-1C301U Notebook PC.