Well, they certainly cut backed on the tension and seriousness in this episode. They threw in a couple of cute little moments and lots of good laughs in this one instead. Like StrikerS, it seems it’s hit the budget wall as I noticed some dips in the art quality here and there although it was nowhere near as great of a drop as StrikerS.

In this episode, it is revealed to us that Aono has been sick since she was little (or maybe that was revealed in a previous episode and I just missed it). At any rate, this begs the question of whether my first theory about “what” she is from my review of the second episode holds or not. If it still holds, I guess she must be a new one that was picked off of the streets or something. Could she be weak because she’s still young? In the manga, we learn that Matsuri is actually 350 years old, so that might be it. There are enough possibilities about what her true nature is to make my head spin. I just hope it’s not going to be any of the ones I’m going to come up with as the series progresses because then the shock value would not be as great.

I’ve kind of watched this episode twice (well, when doing reviews I give it one run and then another run to take the screenshots, although not in its entirety literally since I sometimes skip a bit) and it still bothers me as to how easy it was for Mana to accept and allow Matsuri to live at Yorito’s place. Maybe she will come to regret this decision in the future if Koyori somehow gets involved and subsequently dies or is injured badly? Oh, this could get very good. ;)

Not much to say, really, since the title of this blog entry says it all and I’m sure you guys aren’t blind to that image that’s on the right hand side. If you’re reading this from an rss feed, you can follow the link here instead. I’m not going to keep a backlog and will just rotate the file directly as I go, if you want something just tell me since I keep all my walls. All walls will be in PNG format to preserve the quality, make your own JPGs if you got a problem with that.

Well, there wasn’t much of a fight really, but I liked what little of it there was. It was naturally not as awesome as the final battle in 『トロイメント』 (although surprise, surprise, NOMAD is responsible for the animation of sola and 『ローゼンメイデン』), but it sufficed. I have to say that I found it a bit odd that Matsuri had enough strength to jump on out of the church but she was somehow utterly incapable of even leaving the premises, merely sitting at a corner panting for her life. That was…well…badly played. It’s certainly different from the events of the manga. Given the differences that was present between 『ローゼンメイデン』’s manga and its anime adaptation, I guess I shouldn’t be expecting sola’s adaptation to follow the events of the manga?

Nothing has been revealed yet about our mysterious Rei clone, Aono, but it seems pretty obvious that she appears to know something about Matsuri and/or her pursuers. I think once her ailment has been revealed, a lot will be answered. I can see two possibilities here. Either she is a) a being like Matsuri, a yakabito, or b) is in her current state because of Matsuri or someone like her. If she’s the former, that means we might get our classic “I am not actually your sister and I secretly harbour feelings for you” stereotype, which would be a disappointment, to say the least, unless they execute it properly (there are always exceptions and I think I’ve been quoting this clause a lot).

Unfortunately, with no real previews, I really have nothing to go by as to what to expect from the next episode. As aforementioned on my review of the first episode, it’s possible that nothing exciting is going to happen until the very end, but let’s hope that it doesn’t have to come to that.

Well, if you talked to me at all prior to this blog post about StrikerS, you’ll know that I’ve been complaining about the drop in quality of the art, primarily centred around the faces of the characters. DamagedGoodz’s encoding came out really nicely in my opinion, so part of it might have just been a bad case of raws. I downloaded two of the four raws that I could find, and both was bearable for viewing purposes, but was pretty bad otherwise. Of course, since I’m an impatient person, I’ll keep downloading the first raws that come out even if it’s in the flv format.

So, we got a bit of action again this episode, although it’s really got nothing on the first episode. I didn’t think I would’ve thought too highly of Erio and Caro, but they seem to be aright. So really, the only person that sucks right now is Subaru, and given how she has been portrayed in the episodes so far, maybe this was what the writers intended from the start. ;p

Since this series is going to be twenty-six episodes and the next episode is called “First Alert”, it leaves you wondering whether it (or this potential “mini-arc”) will really has anything to do with the actual plot. With the past two seasons, there was really no time for filler episodes (though they still threw a few in in the first season), so the ball got rolling pretty quickly (or instantaneously, in the case of A’s). No one likes filler episodes, but if done correctly (like most things in life), they can add some more bang for your buck. When it comes down to it, as long as I get plenty of Hayate and Reinforce II, I think I can forgive them. Crappy endings, however, are generally unforgivable, but let’s not go there because I always get pretty riled up when talking about endings.