Back in late September of last year, I thought that Higurashi no Naku Koro ni was all wrapped up. The main characters had all died. Some repeatedly and graphically. Some repeatedly by inference. Imagine my joy when I found out a second season was coming in July! Well, actually I waited until this week to actually pick it up, my interest having waned in the intervening months.

I shouldn’t have strayed, Oyashiro-sama! Please forgive me! “Reunion” is a single-episode segue between the two seasons rather than a new plot arc, and features our buddy Ooishi meeting up with Akasaka and a third man in 2005, twenty-three years after the Great Hinamizawa Disaster. They discuss the popular theories of the day regarding the nature of the incident, including some of the ramblings of Takano Miyo, the nurse that keeps disappearing on the night of the festival. From the TIPS, it’s fairly clear that Miyo has a variety of nutty theories about the Curse of Oyashiro-sama, so seeing these men fixated on an alien-landing-strip theory was quite amusing for me. Best twist for this episode: they put Rena as the sole survivor of the disaster. Previously that role, when mentioned at all, was exclusively the domain of Keiichi. She reports that Rika had tried to inject her with something. Very interesting, in light of how Mion and Rena tried to take a syringe to Keiichi in the “Demoned Away” chapter (the very first plot arc). Were they really trying to help him after all?

Continue reading →

For some reason I’d been skimping on my manga lately. I haven’t read Air Gear in a while, Noritaka keeps falling off my radar, Gantz was never really able to hold my attention, and I haven’t even been keeping up with Otogi no Machi no Rena’s slow release schedule. The other day while trolling through 4chan’s /a/ board, though, I stumbled upon Mirai Nikki, a suspense / action title with an interesting concept and what looks like rather sporadic fan translations.

Mirai Nikki means “future diary” and is about a socially-inept high school student named Yukiteru Amano, who obsessively records everything he sees into a diary-like log on his cellphone. When one of his imaginary friends (for he has no real friends) decides to play a new game with him, things get interesting. His diary starts writing itself, and shows him the future. This is all well and good until this phone tells him that a serial killer is going to murder him.

Happily, Mirai Nikki doesn’t fall into the age-old Sci-fi trap of time paradoxes and such, allowing our protagonist to influence his own future. After escaping near-certain doom, Yuki discovers that eleven other people were given the ability to see into the future as well, and over the next ninety days or so they are to hunt each other down. The last person standing will inherit the title of Yuki’s imaginary friend, who just happens to be the god of space and time.

The main character falls squarely in the downtrodden-everyman category that has become so hackneyed in Japanese fiction, but five chapters into this story I’m really quite excited to see where all of this is heading. Due to the clearly limited scope of the premise (twelve competitors, three months), I’m optimistic that the plot won’t spin itself completely out of control like so many other manga I’ve had to give up over the years.

With the casting changes of Episode 8 and 9 behind us, Tengen Toppa Gurren-Laggan is back out of its transitional phase with episode 11. Time for us to settle in and watch the young man face up to his destiny.

With the discarded princess Nia now the focus of attention amongst the Dai Gurren Dan, and apparently amongst slathering fanboys across the blogosphere and *chans, the original core trio of Simon, Kamina, and Yoko (with Simon looking in with envy at the other two’s budding romance) is now Simon, Nia, and Yoko.

Poor Yoko. Hard on the heels of a great personal loss, she kept a stiff upper lip in front of her peers and provided no help to Simon in his hour of need. Now a pretty young princess fallen from the ranks of the enemy has taken her place. Episode 12, “Miss Yoko, I Have Something to Ask of You,” finally has given Yoko a chance to work out her issues a bit, something I figured Gainax wouldn’t bother doing. The first half of the episode focuses on a one-sided rivalry with Nia, with Yoko losing at every turn. After the obligatory fight between giant robots starts up, Yoko gets a chance to take the reins and show the bad guys, her comrades, and the viewing audience what she’s really made of.

Aside from the obvious fanservice draw, episode 12 brings one of my favorite characters back into the foreground where she belongs, and not just as a couple of boobs and thighhigh stockings.