Only one girl can hoist the trophy from the Summer Tournament. But which girl has won Takahiro’s heart? And will we really care?
What They Say:
Series Finale
Episode 12: “When Summer Ends”
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
So, it comes down to the final round and…of course Celia wins. Noel tries her hardest, but the clouds part only to allow the sunlight to stream down on Noel’s defeated body lying in the mud. Takahiro runs to her, but more importantly, Mireille is standing. Noel’s still in something of a daze, but she does get to see an amazing sight: her little sister Mireille walking again. Because, you know, after a lengthy time of being paralyzed (for psychological reasons), she can suddenly start walking again. So, happy family again.
Remind me what show we’re watching again?
Well, at least Takahiro the Robot has finally made up his mind. For the final round, he will act as squire to Mio, at least that’s the signals I’m getting from what he says to Mio at this point. Takahiro runs back to the stables to see what happened with the foal and all appears well there too. He tells James about the finals and then heads back. James says that Takahiro seems happy. How can he tell? I can’t tell. I’d be greatly surprised if anyone human and not a sock puppet of the writer could tell.
In a meeting with Reina, it appears that Takahiro must take part in the tournament as either knight or squire or else withdraw from the school. It’s fine, he tells her, because he’s decided to act as a squire…this time. After that, he plans to become a knight again. He gives some speech about why he was afraid to reenter the lists, blah blah blah, do we really care? Eh, it’s an excuse to just show the other girls in passing images as well as some reused animation from this episode (you can tell they wanted to save the budget a bit for the final fight scenes). After that, Takahiro officially drops the announcement on everyone that he’ll act as Mio’s squire. It disappoints Celia, but he comforts her with the thought that she’s never alone as everyone cares about her.
So, how will they play this? Will it be a long, drawn out affair where Mio barely loses? Will it be a slow but triumphal uphill climb for Mio, with Celia being bested not by luck but the combination of Takahiro’s alleged jousting genius and Mio’s excellent vision? What do they give us? Okay, montage time with a strategic replay of Miyuki Hashimoto’s “Un-delayed,” the opening theme (there was no opening animation to start this final episode). Maybe it’s for the best that the music takes the place of any idiotic commentary. After a series of rounds where both girls show their skills, we have a climax as someone’s feathers are seen flying.
They don’t leave us in the dark for long. We see the after victory portrait of Celia hanging in her room at school. But the show doesn’t end here. For the final coda to our proceedings, Reina takes Celia into town for a visit to Tart Time. There, everyone has put together a surprise victory party for her. This was something new, as no one had thrown one for her the previous two times she won the tournament. It’s a chance for the girls to play out their character archetypes (and for Bertille and James to get drunk). And a final attempt by the girls to get Takahiro to say who he really likes, which is done under the cover of asking which girl he would have served as squire to at the beginning of the tournament if he hadn’t been called to the stable to help with Marengo. Instead of answering he runs away. That’s appropriate for this series, which ran away from most opportunities to be any good, instead grasping for mediocrity every time.
Series Retrospective:
There have been some dating simulation game to anime adaptations that have been moderately successful in terms of begetting a decently entertaining show. A few have been quite well done (such as the Key/Visual Art’s-Kyoto Animation collaborations of Air, Kanon, and Clannad, especially that last one). This is not one of them.
Walkure Romanze is, in the end, a rather pedestrian affair. The plot arcs, such as they were, are enough to set up occasions where a player of such a game would be able to meet hot girls and try to chat them up on the way to getting into romantic situations with them (and for “romantic situations,” you should read “have sex”). For a game, it works. As a piece of non-interactive entertainment, it does not. What happens when one is experiencing these events “personally,” with the control that being the player in a game gives you, is entirely different from passively sitting and seeing someone else meet cute girls. If this were an erotic animation, a work of hentai, with explicit sex scenes, the weak scaffolding provided by the scenarios for each of the girls would suffice, since they’re not what the viewer of such a work is primarily interested in seeing.
But that’s not what this show is. It’s a piece of blandness that features very beautiful female character designs and may well be nothing more than a set up for an eventual full hentai OVA, much in the way that Ricotta’s previous work that received an anime adaptation, Princess Lover, was followed by a fully explicit OVA afterwards that featured the best girl (hint, it ain’t Mio who would get front and center of the erotic OVA I have some suspicions will come. If you pay attention to hair colors, it’s easy to guess who my money would be on). If in the end this is something of a marketing piece, meant to interest viewers in Ricotta’s game and the hope of an explicit OVA to follow, I’d say that it’s somewhat successful, dependent on how long one can stay awake and pay attention, long enough to be able to see all of the girls at least once in their best light. But as an independent work of entertainment, it’s not an outright failure, but is not in any way a success, not even a qualified success. It’s boring and the characters lack depth. Unless you happen to find one of the girls appealing, there’s really no reason to watch the show at all.
Series Grade: C-
Episode Grade: C
Streamed by: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Apple iMac with 4GB RAM, Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard