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Release the Spyce Episode 9 Review

This week, Release the Spyce turns its attention to the driven Yuki Hanzomon as she attempts to convey to Momo the story of her mentor. I guess timing wise this makes sense given Hanzo slapped Momo last week for being rash and they never have revealed the story behind Hanzo’s scar so with only a handful of episodes to go, this one feels purposefully placed.

The problem, I feel at least, is that we really could have skipped a whole bunch of steps between episode one and here without appreciably being any worse off. It just makes some of the episodes earlier really feel more fillery than they did while watching, and some of them felt very fillery while watching.

I don’t really like to review by comparison, but I can’t help but feel Princess Principal took this basic idea of team of teenage female spies and did a much better job of building them up as characters while continuing to draw the main plot together. Release the Spyce has a more modern setting but otherwise comes off as a fairly pale imitation, and that may not be what they were going for and it may not be how others see it, but that’s more or less how it has settled in for me.

Still, that doesn’t really review this episode and to be honest, once we got into the flash back and actually saw the girls and their old mentors parachuting in and doing spy things, it was actually really fun. There was some genuine drama around revealing how Hanzo got her scar and what happened to her mentor and it was perhaps one of the better sequences this anime has given us since its first episode.

However, as a whole, Release the Spyce hasn’t quite packed the punch I’d really have liked from it, and even looking at it from the perspective of a cute girls show where they just happen to be spies, it isn’t overly great.

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RELEASE THE SPYCE: YUKI HANZOMON

Review:

While I can appreciate a story that takes its time getting to a point, that’s kind of only if I’m finding the set up and opening moves interesting, and Blue Exorcist season 2 is suffering from a severe lack of interesting developments. After barely getting any story so far and wading through a lot of teen angst, we’re now flashing back while reading a letter from the head priest to Rin, which of course Rin can’t read because of how its written so Yukio is reading out loud.

It isn’t that Fujimoto and learning more about him isn’t interesting and it isn’t that I think this won’t be relevant later, it’s just we’re now 5 episodes into this season and other than two eyes being stolen and people apparently trying to retrieve them, this plot is seriously not moving. I guess if you like the characters more, Rin’s struggle to control his powers and the potential of him becoming a target might be enough to engage you, but to be honest for me that’s just background noise and at the moment most of these episodes feel like background noise.

Blue Exorcist is available on AnimeLab.

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