Quote:
Originally Posted by kk2extreme
this will make the saddest ep of the year
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There's a lot of months left in this year, but I daresay you may be right.
A brilliant episode. I think there's a bit too much focus on Nagisa's death because it just overshadows how brilliant the entire episode was. From beginning to end, it was better than anything in this season so far and better than everything from the first season except maybe one other episode. And the final scene was the most powerful in the entire combined story to date. Everything was executed brilliantly (maybe not as well as the game, some would argue, but as well as an anime could), and the entire episode carried a lot of depth and meaning and symbolism. Kotomi's speech about multiple worlds hearkens back to ideas that have been explored in works like Ever 17 or Noein (both excellent stories in their own right), and there were a lot of really interesting themes at work, including the ongoing one about Tomoya's reaction to the changing town ("I'm coming to hate this town" was one of the more powerful lines in the episode).
As for the last scene, I didn't cry at first, even when it was clear that Nagisa was dying, but when Nagisa's theme started playing, I lost it. They used a really vibrant and shiny colour scheme for the scenes where Tomoya was remembering Nagisa, and there's a fairly obvious reason why they went with that, which doesn't really need to be spelled out. But a little thing like that makes all the difference; it shows that they've put the deserved amount of care into this.
What they didn't put any care into was the ED theme. I'm not going to pull punches, playing "Torch" at that moment was an outright failure on KyoAni's part. It wasn't just jarring, it was inappropriate, in my mind. Anything would have been better. "Dango Daikazoku" would have been more appropriate. Hell, they could have put something else at the beginning and saved "Toki wo Kizamu Uta" for the ED. They played "Ana" at the end of ep 24, it's not like they haven't changed ED themes to better suit the moment in the past.