Too bad you aren't the girl who can leap through time.
An example of Anti-Skill fail.
List of shoddy highlights:
It's summer at Academy City, and most of the students are enjoying their summer vacation. As such, Anti-Skills are called to help Judgment patrol the streets and maintain order.
Day 1:
- Tessou is late for her patrol with Yomikawa. The two gets called to help with a robbery and Tessou ends up becoming a hostage, but Yomikawa resolves the situation by throwing a riot shield into both the bad guy and Tessou.
- Later in the day, Tessou runs into Mikoto and friends at an arcade. Tessou is supposed to tell the students to go home as it's almost time for curfew, but she is almost tempted into playing a game by Mikoto's gang. Yomikawa shows up to snap Tessou back to the task at hand. Yomikawa goes to shoo away rest of the arcade's patrons, and Ruiko and Kazari recognizes that one of the customer is a boy named Kounoe from their class.
- Tessou, Yomikawa, and Komoe enjoy a night out in the spa and then have dinner and a few beers together.
Kurozuma and Konori aren't the only fans of Musashino Milk.
In such an advanced city, you'd think that every Anti-Skill would get a GPS... but then again, maybe Tessou wouldn't even know how to use one.
Day 2:
- Tessou has an unsuccessful day on the patrol which included causing a traffic jam.
- Late in the day Tessou goes to the arcade again to tell the students to go home. Tessou notices Kounoe playing an old fighting game called Gekisho 9 which she had used to play. Tessou distracts Kounoe into losing and Kounoe leaves.
- On their night out, Yomikawa and Komoe notice that Tessou is feeling down, and Yomikawa suggests that Tessou do something fun to cheer herself up.
Good thing Yomikawa doesn't drive, and Komoe doesn't get drunk.
Day 3:
- Tessou is stuck at school marking exams. Yomikawa lets Tessou off of the patrol, but in exchange Tessou has to finish her marking and pay for dinner next time.
- After finally finishing her work, Tessou goes to the arcade again and sees Kounoe playing Gekisho 9. Tessou unlocks a secret character in the game and is about to start playing, but she is called away by Komoe who told Tessou that Yomikawa was in an emergency situation.
- It turns out that the "emergency" was just Yomikawa getting drunk, and Tessou is tasked with carrying Yomikawa home. On the way, Komoe asks if Tessou feels happy. Komoe then states that she's happy everyday because she loves all the different students in the city, including the person who blew off her roof.
Look who finally decided to show up.
Who's the girl on the left?
Day 4:
- Tessou is back on patrol and she's surprisingly enthusiastic. On her patrol, Tessou encounters Index (who is chasing a cleaning robot for sweeping up her dropped donut) and Aisa (who tries to buy all the hamburgers from a fast food joint). Tessou also helps a girl find her lost pedant.
- After the patrol, Tessou goes to the arcade to play Gekisho 9. In the process, she is challenged by someone using her favorite character and she loses the match. Tessou then discovers that it was Kounoe she was playing against. Tessou walks Kounoe back to his place while talking about the video game and Kounoe thanks Tessou before parting with Tessou.
- After parting with Kounoe, Tessou receives a call from Yomikawa telling her to get to the dinner place since Tessou is supposed to be treating.
Should save your celebration for after you've won the slot machine jackpot.
Last Day (not necessarily day 5):
- Tessou and Yomikawa visit the arcade during the day and learns from Mikoto's group that Kounoe has transferred to a school specialized in video game development. Tessou is quite happy with the news and enthusiastically continues her patrol.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A filler episode about a fairly unimportant side character and her love for a 10-year-old video game. The video game story with the boy is not much to talk about, but this episode was not entirely uninteresting. If you were wondering why the Anti-Skill are so useless, just take a good look at this episode. I don't want to be mean, but I'd be a little worried if someone like Tessou was in charge of maintaining peace and order in my community. She didn't exactly put up a stellar performance this episode. It's not that she's not a nice person, but she's a bit too bumbling for the duties required for a riot/SWAT police squad member. I suppose Tessou is not representative of the entire Anti-Skill (at least I hope not), but Anti-Skill are just too easy to make fun of. At least Yomikawa is somewhat capable at taking down regular criminals, although she does seem to have a drinking problem (hope she doesn't drink and drive).
Other than the story on Tessou, this episode had some interesting cameos. Komoe had a similar extended role like in episode 14, and Index and Aisa finally showed up doing their usual goofy things. I have a feeling that the girl who lost her pedant might also be a cameo appearance or someone important, but I don't know who she is. The little girl in the picture inside the pedant looks somewhat familiar, but I can't pin a finger on that either.
Next episode is another filler about Mikoto and Kuroko's dorm supervisor, who seems less fierce than before. I'm not holding high expectations for that episode either, but it'd be fun if the supervisor will knock Kuroko out at least once in the episode.
Accelerator calls them stupid pacifists teachers.
ReplyDeleteThe real special forces are not on the show yet.
Most pointless episode ever? I'm not a big fan of these episodes that focus on the side characters. They're just not that interesting.
ReplyDeleteBTW TJ you made a mistake about saying Tessou fighting the final boss in the arcade. She actually unknowingly fought Kounoe who also used the secret character Jamie like Tessou.
ReplyDeleteI think you forgot or never played fighting games as most people know that if the message "A New Challenger appears" on screen, it means a human player has join the game and wants to fight you.
It's pretty embarrassing for you not to know this since younger people than me know this fact.
The girl in the pendant is the one who died (?) in the experiment - the one Kiyama was trying to help.
ReplyDelete@Lero
ReplyDeleteYeah, it'd make sense for Academy City to have a more capable policing force somewhere to take care of the really dangerous or important tasks. Both Anti-Skill and Judgment are almost like volunteer organizations.
@RP
Yeah, it was a pointless filler, and there will be more to come given it's all anime-original material from now 'til the end of the season.
@Anonymous
Summary corrected. I had the feeling that Tessou was playing Kounoe but got lazy with the summary. You've caught me red-handed. I'm not familiar with arcade fighting games, although I used to play a lot of Smash Brothers back in the days.
@mikoto
Oh yeah, no wonder she looked familiar.
Not much of an episode, the side character doesn't contribute anything to the story and the index hunting for food was rather annoying because that's the only thing she did in each episode of To Aru Index.
ReplyDeleteSo far i'm not really impressed with the To Aru Railgun spin-off and i hope they don't plan to make a second season out of because it's kinda...boring.
@jamjam
ReplyDeleteThey probably should have just made this series 12-13 episodes. There's not enough manga material for a 24~ish episodes so they resort to fillers and anime-original stories, which unfortunately aren't as good as the manga stuff.
Yeah, Railgun probably signed its own death warrant by filling the second half with plot fillers which focused on side characters who do not contribute anything significant to the story. If they had left it at the Level Upper arc, I would've given the whole thing a higher rating. The first major arc is still not a masterpiece per say, but since all these fillers came along, my assessment of the overall series just lowered. I know the author is involved in the productions but you'd think he would come up with better stories than just these. I don't know... These just feel kind of...lazy. However, I would still want them to do a Season 2. The Sisters Arc definitely needs to be animated. It's more exciting than Level Upper if I do say so myself.
ReplyDeleteOh and as for Judgment and Antiskill, they are volunteer organizations, sometimes with special allowances. Even then, Judgment are doing a better job than them sometimes, even with cases outside their jurisdiction. Shame on the teachers for being bested by students. :p
Wow this episode felt long. Not a good long, just it seemed to take forever to finish. Not that the teacher is a bad person, just that she's not that interesting. I can see why she wouldn't be so excited if she had to live that life.
ReplyDeleteMaybe this was to give an excuse why Anti-Skill are so useless. A bunch of teachers pulling a double shift. Who the heck would have time to teach, grade, set up lesson plans, and bust criminals? Seems they are pulling two full-time jobs there. Makes sense why they seem incapable. Some are just teachers doing this in their spare time. You'd think a city like that would have a real police force. This is one poorly run city.
Anyways I kind of agree. With the material they had should probably have kept it to 13 episodes. Really considering where this episode falls time wise we won't get to see anymore fun Touma and Mikoto interactions so not a ton left to look forward to. Might have made more sense to cut a couple in the early part and end the series on that Saten epilogue episode.
@Keiri
ReplyDeleteYeah, I hope they'll animate the Sisters arc eventually too. I am also hoping that the upcoming anime-original arc won't suck, but signs don't look too good right now.
@FlareKnight
I took the episode mostly as commentary on the incompetence of Anti-Skill, so it wasn't too boring, but yeah this is not what I would want to see from this show.
I personally enjoyed this episode, as it showed one of my favorite side-characters: A cute meganekko teacher! :D
ReplyDelete