04.08
The face that haunts my dreams is back... >_<
Been a while hasn’t it? When last I watched the unspeakable abomination that is Gatchaman Crowds, the show gave me one of the most mindbogglingly inept finales ever, rife with plot holes, characters shunted to the sides, and a final battle that was… not a final battle… at all. At that time, I prayed to the anime gods that such a disaster should never be repeated and I would never have to do Crowds-Sourcing ever again.
…Since then, Tatsunoko has announced Gatchaman Crowds Second will be airing this year and they gave us a new final episode for the blu-ray set Clearly, there is no god.
No no no its spelled "incredibad".
Ok so NEW Crowds 12 is actually kinda interesting in that only roughly 2 1/2 minutes of the estimated 24:00 run time has been retained from the original broadcast cut. I assume the rest was edited back into episode 11, which if you recall was a half-assed half-recap episode originally. As I have not yet seen the blu-ray version of Crowds 11, this is based entirely on the fact that the events of this episode are set after the eyecatch of the original version so it makes sense. In which case I refer you to the original write up I did of Crowds 12 last September.
But Rock Paper Scissors Jaguar is in Kamen Rider Crowds!
So anyway, Crowds 12! The Crowds Game is finishing eliminating the NeoXHun CROWDS and turning them into small boxes for orderly disposal. Or in this case, being turned into NOTEs so that their victims can get their souls back or something. The Gatchaman team is proclaimed heroes by the Japanese government and considering there’s no more Mess to fight and no more CROWDS to fight, they’re kinda taking it easy. Paiman gets drunk, Sugane enters college and goes boozing for the first time with Jo, Rui gets to enjoy the life of a Japanese school girl for the first time (DON’T ASK), O.D. (who despite getting impaled by Katze previously is still alive somehow) and Utsutsu pray to avant garde cactus sculptures, J.J. Robinson continues to do nothing but make paper airplanes, and Hajime wanders around like an idiot while posing for photos with her fanboys.
Because you can't spell yuri without Rui!
BUT WHAT ABOUT BERG-KATZE?!?
Well apparently he left Earth after it stopped being fun for him to be a masochist… or did he? One day, Hajime reopens the Gatchannel to announce she’s going on a date with everybody’s favorite hermaphrodite. The Gatchaman team and a swarm of unlookers rush to the local train station to witness this fiasco only to see Hajime essentially talking to herself for 2 minutes straight. …or is she? You see that crowd of onlookers? That’s actually the various people Katze gave big wet kisses to last summer and Hajime being the all-knowing god of the Nakamuraverse that she is, sees right through his disguise. What follows is arguably the most facepalm inducing, downright bizarre five minutes that Gatchaman Crowds has yet produced for us. So bizarre that I had to watch it not once, but twice to determine if I was halucinating or not. Basically Hajime uses her scissors of death to Hassan-chop Katze’s beautiful red locks before turning him into a note (by KISSING HIM I might add) and shoving him into her chest, making various somewhat sexual howls in the process. …I got nothin.
Mating cycle of the Rare Tatsunoko Blowfish.
Well anyway the rest of the episode is pretty much the original ending. Innocent Note gets a new remix (or maybe its an alternate edit, I don’t know), and there’s no teaser for the rather ominous Crowds Second. Yeah I think I’m done here.
Oh man, am I so looking forward to the bedroom coversations between THOSE two!
Crowds 12 Redux on one hand is definitely an improvement over the original. It fixes a lot of the problems the first version had which basically was that the show had even less to do with Gatchaman after Nakamura became so damn obsesssed with his GALAX and CROWDS Game bullshit. This version is far more focused on the protagonists which is what it should have been in the first place but sadly that also means the episode is very, VERY Hajime. I can’t tell if its because I have not looked at Crowds not one second since the show ended but Hajime seemed more “special” to me this time around, and that’s saying quite a bit. And then there’s Katze… poor poor Katze. Last time I complained about how there was no damn explanation as to what happened in the time skip and that it felt like Nakamura was just trying to cover his tracks with lazy story telling. Now… I kinda want that mystery back. What I have seen cannot be unseen, regrettably.
Ryota Ohsaka after learning he was in both Crowds AND Valvrave this year...
So anyway… that was Crowds… AGAIN. See you in a few months for Crowds Second. “Yay!” he said with a posed look. >_< 4/10.