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R1 DVD Reviews
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Written by maehara
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Tuesday, 19 June 2007 17:00 |
 Iris finally gets involved with the action, while Sakura takes a trip home to get her katana repaired and Yamazaki continues to ramp up the pressure on his former comrades. Yup, it's another volume of Sakura Wars TV - and not a theatre performance in sight...
14 - Iris Goes Forth!
Iris' koubu is almost ready for use, but before it's properly complete it needs to be calibrated to her aura - so it's something of a major problem that Iris doesn't want to use it. She's been brought to the Flower Division because of her powers, but she's an essentially peace-loving little girl and simply doesn't want to fight, so Kohran calls on Sakura to help her change Iris' mind. When they talk, though, Iris tells Sakura that part of the reason is that she doesn't want to become a wakiji, and that'll happen if she pilots a koubu. The ramblings of a child, or is there some truth to it? Meanwhile, the location of the Black Sanctum Council's wakiji factory has been traced, and the Flower Division are ordered to destroy it - but when they arrive, the Council are expecting them...
15 - Sakura's Returns to her Homeland
After damaging her sword Arataka in the battle against Satan (a valuable family heirloom, don't forget), Sakura returns home to Sendai to have it repaired, with Ohgami accompanying her. With Arataka being a spiritual sword, and Sakura feeling a lot of responsibility for its damage, what would otherwise have been a happy homecoming is instead something she's almost dreading. As well as the physical work to be done on the sword, there's the ritual Ceremony of Kanuchi to complete, so that the sword is once again endowed with spiritual power - but can Sakura complete the trials the Ceremony requires? Back at the theatre, meanwhile, Sumire's discovered a renewed desire to improve herself, while the Flower Division's apparent inability to deal with the Black Sanctum Council is again causing some concern amongst its backers...
16 - Anti-Kouma Squad
Time for a flashback, to 1917 when the threat posed by the kouma first became apparent and the Imperial Anti-Kouma Squad was first formed. Along with Ayame & Yoneda, the squad's members included Sakura's father Kazuma - and Yamazaki, the man now known as Satan, who before apparently switching to the Dark Side had drawn up the original plans for the Spirit Armor used by the Flower Division. So why would someone so promising choose to switch sides? The slide began when the military refused to provide the funding to build his Spirit Armor, his bloodlust began to take over, and he began to question if the people who refused to fund his pet project were really worth protecting...
17 - The Overture
Flashbacks over, and back in the present-day Yamazaki's still working on summoning his army - although now he appears to be moving away from summoning pure wakiji and is moving into other areas. Ohgami and Sakura are back from Sendai, meanwhile, with Sakura's katana once again ready for action. Yoneda and Ayame are aware that the Black Sanctum Council is planning for something, but at this stage they don't know what. Ohgami is ordered to make plans to make sure his squad are ready, while Kohran's efforts to fine-tune Iris' koubu don't go quite according to plan. Before she can finish the job, though, the Council's wakiji attack...
Plenty in this volume to keep action fans - like me - happy, while the highlight is episode 16's flahback that fills in the details of how Sakura's father died, why Yamazaki turned to the Dark Side™, and looks at what would become the beginnings of the Flower Division. I'm a sucker for a well-presented backstory, and ep 16 provides plenty of details to really flesh out the background to the show's "current" events.
Plenty of action scenes, too - only Sakura's return home in episode 15 breaks up the fun, and that's a good character piece for her as it shows what sort of family she's come from and what level of devotion they have to keeping Japan free from the forces of evil. It's also clear that Sakura's feeling the weight of responsiblity that her position is putting on her, and seems to dread anything happening that could be considered a failure on her part.
Also on the personal development front, it was good to see Iris actually play a part in the action, however brief her appearance may have been. Up to now she's almost been the "token cute kid" - which fair enough she does quite well, but to finally see her really get involved was a definite plus for the character.
Yamazaki takes up an ever-greater amount of screentime now as he becomes more and more of a threat to the Flower Division, and while ep 16 does give some background on his motivations, you're still left wondering how much he's driven by trying to get one over on Ayame and Yoneda. It certainly seems like a very personal campaign, at any rate.
I'm an action junkie, so naturally this volume, with its complete absence of theatrics, caught my attention better than the previous outings. I'm still having a hard time getting to really like most of the characters, though, and that does put a limit on just how appealing the story can be - it's hard to really get into a series when you can't quite manage to care about the people on the screen. That's probably my lack of exposure to the games speaking, but given that they haven't been released in English I'm not going to be the only person with that problem. Sakura Wars TV entertains, up to a point, but the premise has so much promise that the show fails to live up to that you can't help but be frustrated at times. There are still two volumes left for that to be corrected, but to be honest, I'm not holding my breath...
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