Recap: Harutora and Natsume defeat whats-her-face, and Harutora enrolls in Onmyo school in Tokyo.

Iro’s Thoughts:
Tokyo Ravens continues to toe the line between me wanting to drop it and never look back and me wanting to see where they go with this. Now that Harutora now hooked up to Natsume’s powers (or whatever it means to be her familiar) the pair head off to beat up Suzuka because… bringing back the dead is bad, I guess? As it turns out, she only summons a demon or something, conveniently rendering the supposed crime of her actions moot and giving the heroes a chance to save her. Bleh.

The fight itself sort of flip-flopped between decent and incredibly tiresome (see: the show in general). Some parts had pretty good animation, but most of it was bogged down with endless shonen-style infodumps where Natsume explains what’s happening as it’s happening. It’s a barrier! It’s a familiar! This is a sword that does sword-stuff! Oh no this is happening! It drags down what could have been a cool action scene and makes it rather boring. But then Harutora throws a box at the demon for an unexplained reason, and it works? I don’t even know. Pick a side, Tokyo Ravens.

We close off the first act with Harutora heading to Tokyo to go to Onmyodo school in Tokyo with Natsume, who has to pretend to be possibly the least-convincing crossdresser I’ve ever seen in anime. We also get the reveal (the reveal that seemed plainly obvious last week) that Hokuto was in fact Natsume’s familiar, so there never was a love triangle to begin with because both ladies were Natsume all along! WHO KNEW? On the bright side, unflappable Toji is also coming along for the ride, and I can only hope he continues to not give a fuck about anything.

Considering the past three episodes were essentially a prologue, I’m slightly more forgiving of the pacing issues and infodumps that I might normally be. On the other hand, it seems that we’ll be in a generic Tokyo high school set-up from now on. At the very least, Tokyo Ravens has earned one more episode of coverage on here. But you’re still on the watch list!

Lifesong’s Thoughts:
On the plus side this first story arc worked moderately well to show us the extents of magic in this universe and provide us with a feel for what Tokyo Raven is all about, on the negative side, it didn’t stand on it’s own very well. I say moderately well because most of what was explained is still fairly ambiguous.

Starting with the things I think this anime did well, I liked the way way it subverted the love triangle. What better way to show us how easily Natsume can manipulate her paper puppets than by creating a human puppet to follow Harutora around. Also, what better way to show us how dense he is than by showing us how he can’t figure out something so obvious…

I can’t help feeling like much of the explanation and world building was sacrificed to speed the story along. I haven’t read the original light novels, but I am seeing adaptation decay red flags all over. For one that felt like a complete story which makes me assume we finished an entire light novel in three episodes.

We have the spider mech shooting barriers that can’t be passed only to become inexplicably passable a moment later. We also have the same spider mech die only to get back up because it can. Following that up a magical box which possibly means more to any Japanese people watching is thrown into the fray to hit the magical thingy in it’s unexplained weakness for massive damage. Yay for information underload?

These things could be foreshadowing events to come and giving us a visual explanation of the magic system. It’s possible this first story arc was simply abandoned to drive the rest of the story forward, or it could just be that the writing is terrible and incapable of building up interesting characters and plot development. The former I can forgive, the latter is a sin that could doom this entire anime series.

Looking forward, I could see this getting better. It seemed like Tokyo Ravens was trying to avoid an info-dump and just turn a story that probably had a lot of info-dumping into an action packed piece. That is a common enough thing in anime, so I’m willing to give Tokyo Raven the benefit of the doubt for a bit longer. I say that because this world seems pretty detailed in a way that isn’t just borrowing cliches from other stories. That said, it could also be utter shit, I’m honestly not sure which is the case here.

I have been having some degree of fun with this show. Because of that I am willing to give this anime a chance to prove that the issues in the first arc were a conscious choice by the director. If I don’t see evidence of that soon… I’m out.