What They Say:
Tomorrow is the school festival and the students are hard at work. As the rock club’s newest member, Alma is preparing for the events when a Dark Stone slides onto campus. Kagami realizes, “We can’t let Miss Ruri find out or she’ll cancel the festival.”
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
As the series rolls on, Sacred Seven manages to be one of the more unusual Sunrise series in that it feels like it’s aping very heavily on other shows over the years and little in the way that feels original or tightly done. When you have an episode like this one where you watch the first half and find that there really is precious little to say about it, you have to wonder. This much fluff in the fourth episode could have its moments if it allows the characters to connect better, but mostly we just keep learning that nobody here is all that interesting to begin with. Ruri and Tandoji have the most time since they’re the leads, but with it essentially “playing school,” there’s little to like.
The basic thrust of it is that as the school life goes on, it’s going to be threatened by a Dark Stones issue when one of them ends up arriving on campus. The fear is that Ruri will end up canceling the festival and, shock and horror, Kagami himself is actually quite concerned about that happening and wants to see it dealt with by Tandoji so that the school doesn’t suffer. There are some cute moments associated with this early on, such as when he transforms in Ruri’s office and another student comes in afterwards only to compliment him on his awesome costume play for the festival. Yet even as Tandoji goes on the offensive looking for this thing, Ruri turns her focus back to the festival itself. When you consider her attention to detail with the past Dark Stone instances, it really paints her in a bad way.
The festival does allow for both Tandoji and Kagami to hunt the critter in the school, where it is causing some trouble with the way it ruins the floors. Kagami gets to use his mobile unit and ends up with praise for its design. Tandoji is called out easily in the costume and there’s even a comical moment in the midst of the hunt where some of the kids throw paint at him. It’s such a disjointed mess with what’s going on here with the cast and their use at school of their powers and suits that it really shows a lot of the problems inherent in it. Particularly with Tandoji trying to keep his identity secret and yet doing this, making it more obvious who he really is to anyone who takes a true gander at him. The action itself is also rather weak and decidedly uninteresting, making a tense moment when some students are in peril as the only really decent moment here, and that’s not saying much at all.
In Summary:
Sacred Seven manages to only slide further downward with this episode and doesn’t offer up much hope for where it can go next since it could slide further or level out here. The show has been a disappointment since the end of the first episode, where we had a potentially interesting idea with some interesting designs and pacing that has now moved to a flavor of the week feeling. It all comes across as so forced and this episode in particular has everyone seemingly acting out of character in a way, even if you can go with some of the light believability of it with Ruri doing her best for the festival because of her own different school life prior to this. When looking at the episode as a whole, and bringing in the two before, it just reinforces what a mess the whole thing is and how difficult it will be to actually salvage it. The core idea isn’t bad, but the execution uses all the bad norms of shows of this nature and none of the good.
Grade: C-
Simulcast 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.
0 comments