The past and present continue to be difficult and now Hazuki is seeing less of his own future. What They Say:
After leaving a revelatory message for Rokka, Shimao goes on the lam with Hazuki’s body. Meanwhile, the bodiless Hazuki gets some unsettling news from the Rokka simulacrum that spurs him into action.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With the nature of the series, it’s certainly been easy to be sympathetic towards Shimao with what he’s done and how he’s hanging on because of Rokka. It’s not an easy thing what happened and with the background we got with his hospital time, it definitely hits home in a strong yet simple way. But as we see him dealing with things while in Hazuki’s body, he’s lost most of his good will because of how he’s acting now, leaving her a message of sorts and heading out with backpack shouldered to try and do something else. Seeing him hide from her as she came to the shop, knowing what he did, and seeing the pain she goes through thinking she’s been abandoned again in a different way is brutal. The teardrops are certainly honest emotions at this stage for all her problems.
What really becomes interesting as she deals with this is that with what Shimao left there for her, and what he took from the shop, she realizes that everything points to Shimao herself. While she thinks Hazuki has left, the confusion over what was left there really gets to her as the arrangements were all key in their relationship and all the tools that he took were things that Shimao used. It certainly paints a picture that hits her hard and has her asking even more questions now, both of herself and of him. Her simple statement to him about returning what he’s taken, stolen in her mind, is something that Shimao comes back with differently, at least in his mind, about how it’s really Hazuki who has stolen things.
As the two of them go through their awkward struggle, Hazuki himself is running into more problems in his dreamland that he’s stuck in. With his little Rokka there, she’s letting him know that more and more he’s in danger of never being able to surface again. While he was generally fine on letting Shimao have a little face time to try and bring some closure to his life, the thought of losing his own life is making him just a little dramatic. And more like theatrical dramatic than overwrought in real fear. It’s seriously but you can’t help but to feel a certain level of playfulness about it as well. What helps soften some of this, though it doesn’t help, is that we see some of Hazuki’s memories of Rokka which are pretty sweet, but the more he thinks of those, the more trapped he becomes where he is.
In Summary:
While the material continues to go in a direction that I can’t exactly say I expected from the first few episodes, nor that it would spend this much time on it, I’m definitely enjoying it as we’re getting a really interesting look at the characters at play here. We’ve had a good exploration of Shimao throughout it and gotten to know both Hazuki and Rokka better independent of each other and that’s made an impression to be sure. Here, we see even more from Rokka’s perspective and it definitely makes a bigger impression and changes how you view her. Similar can be said of Hazuki as he starts to realize the real dangers here and what it is that he truly wants, which is great to see. Things are coming to a changing point again and I’m very curious to see how it will all unfold.
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.
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