Finally finally finally FINALLY FINALLY FINALLY… after dicking around with filler arcs and side stories for what seemed like an eternity, they finally get around to the good part of the story. And thank goodness, because it is good indeed. I’ve been waiting to see this scene animated for a long, long time.

The last few episodes have been following the novels very closely, so it seems that they’ve decided to really get back on track. Man, it’s been a while since I watched an anime episode that made me giddy like this one did. Honestly, instead of wasting the first 7 episodes on filler stuff, they should have just jumped right back into the canon storyline and used the extra money on animating the fight scenes. Especially considering the speed at which they’re moving through the events in the novels; I mean, they basically covered almost half of one novel just in this episode.

I think I’m also finally beginning to see how they’ll work Konoe into the main plot. Really though, the story was fine beforehand; I don’t know what the point of adding her into the mix was, other than as a half-hearted attempt at being a romcom series. Oh well… hopefully they’ve at least managed to come up with something creative.

That said, episode 13 was awesome! Great music and great fight scenes, both things that have been sorely lacking up until now. It was good to finally see Pheles in action as well. I really like her character design, and Inoue Marina’s voice works extremely well for her. It’s very similar to her Yoko voice, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a negative.

Safer Pheles

Also, with the dark operatic music in the background, this shot totally felt like a Final Fantasy moment.

Mmm…kegadoru (bandage) moe mode for Margery-san. I approve.

At any rate, this gives me hope that J.C. Staff hasn’t completely wasted their budget on booze and pachinko, and that there’s still some hope for the key parts of the story that are coming to be executed well. Recently they’ve been doing a good job with following the novels closely and pacing the story well, so I’m cautiously optimistic that the series will improve from here on out.

If you’re one of those who was put off by the first couple episodes of this season, it looks like it may be worth picking the series back up again. And you can basically just start at episode 10, really, because everything before that is either filler or part of an independent side story (eps 8-9), so you would not be missing any of the “real” plot if you just jump right in at 10.

Finally…I dearly hope that this will be used in an upcoming Shakugan no Shana-tan omake. It would probably even make up for all of the wrong this season has done so far.

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A couple new trailers are out, and they’ve revealed some very interesting information that has me really psyched about the second season of Shakugan no Shana!

The first interesting thing that caught my eye was the introduction of two new characters. Well ok, the first thing that caught my eye was “OMG Shana is hawt!”, but I figured that kinda went without saying.

The first of the new cast members is a character from the novels, Firesu (or Pheles, depending on your preference for romanization).

She has a particular interest in Yuuji which I won’t go into in detail about for fear of spoiling too much, suffice to say that… show

In any case, she’s a fascinating character with a mysterious background. She also has awesome long green hair – something which this series has been sorely lacking in up until now.

With the introduction of Firesu to the story, they needed another loli character to meet the minimum DFC quotient, so they brought in Mea.

Mea is a character who first appeared in the Shakugan no Shana PS2 game, which was later ported to the Nintendo DS. I have the DS version of the game, which is classified as a “Battle Adventure Game” according to the Japanese Wikipedia.

Basically it’s like a visual novel type game, where the player makes periodic decisions that influence the progression of the story, but it features turn-based battles in between dialogue sequences that help keep things varied. It’s pretty fun, but also rather short.

At any rate, I think Mea is one of the cooler characters to have been introduced into the Shakugan no Shana universe, so I was pretty excited when I saw her in the trailer.

Aside from being a goth loli with horns and a frilly parasol, she’s also got something of a tsundere streak to her. Of course, no one can compete with Shana in that department, but it still makes for some fun dynamics between the two, which hopefully will transfer well to the animated version.

She’s also…show

Since the game features a separate story arc from the novels, it’ll be interesting to see how they handle the anime adaptation. It would be easy enough for them to keep the Mea plot in its own self contained story arc, and preserve the main story as more strictly canon, but there’s also a lot of potential for weaving the two together in interesting ways.

It’s also very encouraging to see that we’re getting to the part of the story where Yuuji finally learns to suck it up and be a man. If you were put off by his wishy-washy indecisiveness in the first season, stick around, he gets a lot better.

He even has a few GAR scenes, which hopefully we’ll get to see in the anime very soon. On the other hand, he does keep something of a whiny streak, but of course that also helps fuel a lot of the humor between him and Shana.

Anyway, I don’t want to give away too much the story, which in my opinion becomes a lot more interesting after the events of the first season, but fortunately you won’t have to wait long to find out! The show starts up on Thursday, October 4, Japan time. Woohoo, I can’t wait!

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