Well, nothing much really happened in this episode besides the revelation at the end with Chihiro. That was a little shocking as I was having a lot of difficulties deciding on who or what she exactly was. I figured that there might be some kind of a parallel world thing going on or maybe the Chihiro that Renji was meeting this whole time wasn’t actually her but just an image or something. This episode’s thrown that theory out the door though, of course.

Now how does Chihiro remember about her sister or Himura, though? I guess she sees or hears from them often enough to have it hardened or carried over to the next minute in time? Technically, I guess Renji could do the same if the two will forever be together but that’s a pretty lame solution so that’s probably not how they’ll conclude that arc.

We got to hear a nice violin track when Hiro was running up the stairs and I’m hoping that we’ll we’ll get more in the future. The ending theme got swapped with the track that’s played on the website although that’s supposedly the actual opening theme. This track is tons better than the ending theme that was played on the first episode. The animation sequence in question was also really cool. There weren’t too many artistic liberties taken this episode but that animation sequence more than made up for it. :)

This first episode essentially covered most of the stuff that I went through in the demo and then some by delving into Chihiro, Renji, and Yu’s story. Miyako and Hiro’s story seems a little weak here as nothing out of the ordinary really happened in contrast to how Chihiro and Renji’s story concluded in this episode.

I don’t really remember much about the music of this episode as I watched it a little while ago but I will say that the ending is pretty bad. With regards to the art, I’ll say that I’m pretty impressed by it. Of course, it might just look good because it’s the first episode, but I’m really liking some of the stuff that SHAFT has done this episode. I really hope that they’ll keep this up to the conclusion of the series.

I don’t really know how the anime series is intending to wrap up the story of Renji and the others as the first tale. doesn’t really cover their stuff too much (as far as I know). I guess it would work out if they do end up releasing the latter tale. at the end of the year. However, I’m sure we’ll all agree that knowing the story behind a visual novel beforehand vastly degrades the reading experience. So, will they put an alternate ending in the animated series? I sure as hell hope not.

I’m definitely going to be watching this next season in October. I played through the demo for ef - the first tale. yesterday and I was rather surprised as to how much I was able to comprehend. Being able to both hear the voice overs and see the script in question is definitely a huge boon to understanding what the hell is going on.

Tenmon is going to be doing the soundtrack so it’s going to be kicking some major ass. Makoto Shinkai supposedly did work on the game’s movie video’s direction (or production?) itself but I’m not sure if he’s doing anything for the anime adaptation. We’ll see in due time, I s’pose.