Okay, I didn’t see this one coming. I will however accept this conclusion for Renji and Chihiro’s arc since it’s believable enough given the characters in question. I’m guessing the ending in the game is going to be different because the shock value will be completely lost otherwise.

As a whole, I felt that the ending seemed pretty anticlimactic. Maybe the break-up should have happened in this episode and just have that wrap up the arc instead? The ending “messages” that the characters gave also didn’t seem very meaningful to me. And hey, we never got to found out what the deal was with Himuro and Yuko! All you see is the two meeting up at the church after the ending theme, come on! :(

Looking back at the twelve episodes of ef - a tale of memories., I think it really came through with a very strong script, visually imaginative renditions of scenes (this cannot possibly be emphasized enough), and excellent music. What it seemed to fall short of was the lack of a strong storyline to match its unique characters and its failure to develop all of the characters sufficiently. Himuro and Yuko, anyone? And what about our male leads? We know very little about them compared to what we know about our female leads. Perhaps the real problem here was that ef tried to do too many things at once by telling two stories in twelve episodes?

In essence, if you don’t care too much about the plot and am more interested in character dynamics and their relationships, you should definitely give this one a go. However, if you watch shows because you’d like to see a great story unfold, you might get a feeling of wanting more at the end of the ef.

According to a news post, a team has been formed to bring OpenJDK to the Haiku operating system! You can find the project proposal here.

This is great news and I wish Bryan and his team the best of luck!

Well, the first half of this episode was a little dull, but eh, what can you do? I shouldn’t have been expecting too much since they did say they were going out on a date so it was kind of obvious that nothing was going to happen until the end of the episode (or the one after if it came down to that). Still, the date could’ve been more entertaining. I guess the fact that this couple doesn’t interest me didn’t help. I mean, I like the arc and all, but I just don’t really care for the pairing.

In any case, the ending was certainly quite a twist. I don’t know about you all but I was certainly expecting Chihiro to have died in this episode. At least, if not this one then the next. I was expecting her to kill herself to break off her ties with Renji…but no. I will admit that I think this is more painful for Renji since he has to live on knowing that their relationship cannot be the same as it once was even if they did meet again whereas if she just died…well…she’s dead, there’s not much you’re going to be able to do about that.

So what’s in store for us in the next episode? I really can’t say. Will Renji try and confront Chihiro? Will Chihiro and Himura move elsewhere? Well, probably not, that kind of defeats the purpose of ripping those pages out I suppose? What about Himura and Yuko? Yes, what about those two?

This episode has pretty much wrapped up both Kei and Miyako’s arcs. With two episodes to go, I don’t think they’re going to investigate Kyosuke and Kei’s relationship. It would look way too out of place anyway. I was extremely satisfied by this arc’s conclusion. I don’t know if this was an original ending for the anime or not, but whatever, it was beautifully done. Well played, SHAFT, well played.

The script work in this episode was simply brilliant. I really liked the part where Kei was making a series of statements while Hirono was acknowledging them one by one. The voice acting there was simply brilliant. The violin playing in the background only made that scene even more awesome. I like the Hirono x Miyako pairing and all but this part was simply too good for me to pretend/lie and say that the phone conversation the two of them had at the second half of this episode was better than the one Kei had with Hirono.

So, we are left with two episodes to wrap up Chihiro and Renji’s story here. I think two episodes is more than enough but what about Himura and Yuko’s story? Are they going to be addressed at all? Since they’re skipping out on Kyosuke and Kei’s story, does that mean they’re going to skip out on Himura and Yuko’s too? That would disappoint me greatly if that was the case.