[wao]

Just watched it. I admit it may not have felt as good as 4, but still I would most definitely say it's keeping up the quality. The animation is great as usual, and there's always more interesting things coming up.

To answer your question,

Spoiler:

Yeah - right at the end just before Fumie and co get attacked, Haraken says "Stop!" and it stops, "Sit!" and it sits, "Stick out your hand!" and it sticks out his hand. He tells them to hurry because it'll only listen to him for one minute, and what the rest say after kind of freezing there for a few seconds exactly echoes what I was thinking - "Who the hell are you, Haraken"? O_O He just... he just... god, that's so cool.

Haraken as I expected is set up as a mysterious character but not unlikeable, his dad runs a cyber pet company so he'd know how things work... and he's got a totally "hi I'm a mysterious guy who doesn't like to speak a lot" thing going on. And of course I'm a sucker for that. Also, when it is voiced by Paku Romi, it gets an extra super power boost of +1000, so... Yay!

Also, believe it or not - that's the 4th-grade's kid butt there, being spanked by Fumie, and why? Because he's Fumie's younger brother! I didn't see that coming. And he's spanked because she was so annoyed that he joined the Hei Ku club.

Furthermore, Isako is really taking this little queen thing a little too far, she's gone and manipulated the whole Hei Ku team to do exactly her bidding, and lured them to her side with the loads of metabugs she has. In fact this entire episode was her exploiting them to dig up various buses for metabugs to look for something, but what exactly it was I couldn't catch. It was quite funny how the others' were runningo ut of money to pay for the damage but she easily lured two of them over with the metabugs, and Daichi hesitated until she told him she was an angou-ya and then he kind of did a turnabout. Heh.

One last thing, I really really liked that setting of all the abandoned buses. Is this show reading my brain or something? It's exactly the kind of stuff I seriously like - I did a coursework last year precisely about old-style buses (although I ended up taking it out) and I get a huge kick out of seeing those type of buses all lying around abandoned! The design is very much like those old buses I used to rarely see around here when I was younger and the ones that you still see in Sri Lanka. It's awesome.

I liked also how Daichi fell into a "virtual space" - but it was actually a real hole. I think it sort of showed us more about how the space actually works (again, not by long silly expositions and philosophical pondering, but animation! and images!. What happened was that the floor of the bus had broken in real life, but the visual representation of it had not updated with reality and hence showed it as unbroken. Where the broken bits were, there were lots of metabugs because of unstable/broken/lack of data, since technically that segment shouldn't have existed in the reality.

Cool. Seriously.

EDIT: Other things I noticed upon a second watching included how

Spoiler:

Haraken seems to feel a headache just like Isako does when in that space. Could it be that he's an angou-ya like her too? Ooh. Scrap that, I realised that Denpa also felt a headache. Hm...
I still don't understand what Isako was doing there though...

And who is that mysterious person on the bike, I wonder. If it's the female teacher then that is going to be pretty interesting...

It's also nice how Fumie and Yasako change clothes often, but does Yasako have a wardrobe full of the same uniform? Same with Daichi.