Recap: After the events of Hoshi no Umi, Zakuro has a hard time adjusting to daily life in Sakura Newtown. While Kotoha briefs her on the state of half-daemons in town, Akina pays a visit to the graveyard and runs into a whole bunch of unexpected visitors.

Aqua’s thoughts: It feels a bit strange having two epilogue episodes in a row, but it makes a lot more sense once you remember there are three bloody OVAs that have been surgically removed from the show’s overall run. It remains a bit of an alienating thing to do — especially if you know the OVAs were bundled with manga volumes and have probably gone out of print a long time ago. A clip show during the opening credits is all we get by means of a recap, and if anything, Zakuro being the very first thing you see tells us that Hana no Uta has no plans of hiding the fact that it picks up right after Hoshi no Umi. Sure is great for those five people who actually watched that when it came out way back in 2011. Anime!

Anyways, just like Shinozuka last week, the first half of this episode saw Sakura Newtown’s newest resident adorably struggling to get used to everyone being so insufferably nice to her. Luckily, Kotoha is there to provide some much needed exposition and it quickly shows she’s a lot better at it than Enjin will ever hope to be. Yozakura Quartet even manages to introduce the important notion that half-youkai can sense other half-youkai by showing it happening, without a word! Nevertheless, there are still a few strange plot contradictions that need clearing up. The most important one of these is — once again — Enjin. I always assumed our feline foe was actually able to travel between words. Not only did he seem to tune himself out of the picture just a few episodes ago, it would also explain his tendency to pop up out of nowhere.

Yet if he can, in fact, tune himself, why does he need Akina’s body in the first place? And what would be the point of killing Gin’s body to return to the Otherworld? It might just be poor phrasing — I assume the actual intention of the author was to have him threaten to kill Gin, saying it would not afflict his (Enjin’s) soul, and he would just return to the Otherworld. Besides, when did he learn how to teleport? Or throw around evil dark beams of terror? Can Ao do that too? Of course, the guy is both a master of illusion and a pathological liar, but that still doesn’t give him the right to make not a lick of sense.

If anything, Enjin’s random party crashing made for some great action sequences and revelations. Juri gets to dish out some sweet wrestling moves, Morino gets to prove he’s playing for the good guys now and even Shidare gets to debut the Senate’s dangerous new weapon against the daemons of Sakura Newtown. That is, if we leave out the fact that Enjin finds out how it works almost immediately. You’d think that for an organization so obsessed with stylish schemes, the Senate would know the enemy they’re up against is a known mind reader. After yet another beatdown, Enjin pops off again, however not without the revelation that the Shidare’s paranoia has only played into his hands.

Yet aside from all the weird continuity and Enjin shenanigans, this was still a solid episode, with some adorable moments, strong action, and a clever use of the graveyard as a constant factor in all the different subplots. With the strong focus on subplots, some of the main characters get taken out of the picture, but I fully expect next week’s episode to show what they are up to. Yozakura Quartet is no stranger to looking at the same point in time through different perspectives and just so you know, I would totally be up for Hime spending an entire episode wrapped up in bandages and at the end, breaking out of her cocoon as a newborn butterfly. Wait, that got weird quick.

Random observations

• Okay, I can kind of accept Kotoha going commando as being in character, but flashing Kohime’s panties in the middle of a serious action scene? That is kind of sick, Yozakura Quartet.
• Zakuro’s regular voice couldn’t be any different from her menacing snarl in Hoshi no Umi. Great voice work from Kaoru Mizuhara there.
• What the heck is up with the clothes in this show? Not only do they bring back Kotoha’s atrocious vomit-coloured ensemble, they also dressed Zakuro up in some gaudy blue cheongsam rather than her usual white one. Also, Juri has atrocious taste in underwear, apparently.
• “Juri” being a descendant of Victor Frankenstein is one of my arguments in favour of her name actually being Julie. It’s a bit sad the anime seems to be skipping over the arc explaining her heritage, though. It seems to come a bit out of nowhere like this, but at least it explains why she is in Sakura Newtown to begin with.
• By the way, the first episode of the new OVA series, named Tsuki ni Naku, is out now. It’s set after this show, so you’ll probably want to wait until it is over before you dive into these. Gotta love this franchise’s continuity!

Iro’s thoughts: Good thing Aquagaze made me watch the Hoshi no Umi OVAs, because otherwise I’d be way more confused than usual with this show. At least there’s a montage in the opening credits that more or less covers everything, and there’s a couple lines of exposition at the start of the episode that seem to assume we haven’t seen the OVA. But everything else carries on as if we have, so… okay then.

The first thing I noticed, of course, is how much less fanservice the OVA had compared to this show. This show is almost a full panty fighter most of the time, but the OVA only had a scant few fanservice shots, so it was weirdly jarring to come back to Hana no Uta and get butts thrown in my face from the very start of the episode. Why isn’t Kotoha wearing panties and why does the show make a point of telling me this? Why does Zakuro’s cheongsam have a massive cleavage window when it didn’t in the OVA? Why show us Juri’s panties now after avoiding doing so the entire show up until now? Why show us Koihime’s panties? AAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaagggggh!

At the very least, the action scene was fun, fanservice aside. It’s enjoyable enough to see Enjin get manhandled by ostensibly normal people, but considering he seems to have figured out their ace in the hole, I assume he’s going to go right back to being insufferably smug. I’m still not super clear on why he needs Akina to fuse the dimensions if they’re allegedly already fusing, or really why Akina is even around for any reason, but what can ya do. At least it seems that next week’s episode won’t have much of either of them.