As we continue into the second half of the season, all my anime contenders seemed to have settled into themselves at this point, offering a variety of sturdy and compelling episodes. The highlight this week was Yamada’s star turn on Tsurune, but there was plenty to enjoy in Gridman as well, and Run with the Wind is still probably the most consistent new show of the season. I was sad to bid goodbye to the Mistress of Cruelty over in puppet theater country, but outside of that admittedly personal complaint, I really don’t have much to gripe about. It’s a good season, folks! Good dramas, good action, good anime all around. That might make for repetitive Week in Review intros, but it also makes for a very happy Nick. Let’s get right to it then, and see what we’ve got to celebrate as we break this week down!

After the climactic meet of episode seven, Run with the Wind’s eighth episode was a return to our steady incremental progression, checking in with all of our heroes as they recommitted to their various motivations. I enjoyed this episode’s procession of personality-driven slice of life segments, though I feel like the show’s leaning too heavily on Prince’s theatrics when it comes to comedy. He reliably reacts with melodramatic despair in response to basically everything, which means it’s easy to hang a scene’s punchline on him, but also that a long pattern of such punchlines start to feel pretty tedious.

As for this episode’s central drama, Kakeru’s shift from denial of the team to being an even harsher co-captain than Haiji feels very realistic, if a little aggravating in a viewer sense. Embracing Hakone as a goal isn’t going to make Kakeru a more approachable or less insecure person; it just means he’s going to hang his sense of belonging and selfhood on this team reaching their goal, and thus hound all of them with the same mercilessness he applies to himself. Kakeru’s shift was a natural one, and I enjoyed how his final spar with Haiji eventually climaxed at a shot contrasting Haiji’s “you can’t survive on speed alone” with a shot of his injured leg, implying how Haiji has been forced to find satisfaction in running outside of personal excellence. Haiji’s been a somewhat unapproachable character, but revealing his philosophy as being born of his own limitations added a nice splash of color to him. Run with the Wind remains a relentlessly sturdy drama as we move into its second act.

The second half of Mista’s battle with Kraftwerk was pretty much textbook JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, pairing Mista’s narrowly applicable abilities against a flexible Stand that almost totally neutered his power. What strength this episode possessed came largely from its base textual elements; in contrast with last week’s tonally cohesive and engagingly directed episode, this was basically just a functional execution of a pretty cool fight. I liked individual setpiece concepts like Kraftwerk scaling a ladder of rocks to chase our hero, but on the whole felt both Mista’s powers and personality lent themselves more naturally to last week’s tense anticipation and investigation than this week’s active battle. That seems to be a bit of a trend in Golden Wind – while the fights themselves were the standouts of earlier arcs, this season is often at its best when it feels more like a crime drama than an action show. Ultimately, perhaps my favorite thing about this episode was realizing Kosuke Toriumi is going to be using his Enigmatic Gale voice to bring a JoJo hero to life, bringing this season’s two bombastic spectacles full circle. There’s only one thing better than one Enigmatic Gale!

This week’s episode of SSSS.Gridman felt like a cheekily explicit argument staged between the show’s two principle modes, bombastic robot action and melancholy coming-of-age drama. Rikka and Utsumi’s fight regarding their preparation for Akane’s next kaiju was essentially a debate between those two sides, with Utsumi only concerning himself with tactical preparation for the fight itself, while Rikka argued that they should engage with Akane as a human being. Rikka had a pretty solid point – focusing only on defeating each new kaiju is essentially letting Akane set the terms of their engagement, and it seems clear enough that simply matching her challengers will never change this situation. Instead, Rikka took matters into her own hands, leading into a conversation with Akane that was easily this episode’s highlight.

It felt appropriate that this show’s true protagonist would be the one to personally challenge Akane, and Gridman’s consistently excellent direction did a terrific job of conveying Akane’s ever-more-menacing presence. The reveal that Akane has essentially programmed Rikka to like her left me with somewhat mixed feelings, though. While this was a pretty evocative twist in terms of the show’s worldbuilding, it also meant that Rikka’s relationship with Akane is essentially a lie, thus draining her feelings of some emotional solidity. That said, I don’t think Gridman really has enough running time left to satisfyingly illustrate a convincing past relationship between Rikka and Akane, and so making Rikka’s feelings one more of Akane’s ploys seems like a reasonable-enough way to simplify that particular thread. Either way, Rikka continues to be Gridman’s true center as we stride towards the final episode.

Thunderbolt Fantasy arrived at an expected but nonetheless saddening turn this week, as the Princess of Cruelty at last arrived at her face turn, only to immediately be struck down by Shithead Monk. As usual, basically all of the good stuff was stuffed into the final third of this episode – the Princess of Cruelty’s struggle with the Seven Blasphemous Deaths was basically a reprise of scenes we’ve seen before, while the Enigmatic Gale’s negotiations with our crooked cop felt kinda pointless, considering there’s a one hundred percent chance one of them will betray the other within an episode or so. Fortunately, that last act was really great, and brought Xie’s story to a satisfying, if brief, conclusion. I was really holding out for her to at least survive until the final battle, and contribute on Shang’s side in some way – she’s far and away received the most development this season, and been built up into a pretty endearingly tragic figure (mass murdering aside). Watching her get killed basically just to demonstrate the monk’s newfound conviction felt like a perhaps unnecessary waste of narrative resources, but I have to admit that my thoughts there are tilted by my own fondness for the poor Princess. Charismatically evil princesses deserve better than to be killed by villains who are essentially the fantasy version of forum trolls.

I know I’m obviously a Naoko Yamada fanboy, but I don’t think it’s just the fanboy in me speaking when I say that this week’s Tsurune was far and away the show’s best episode since the premiere. It genuinely felt like I at last fully understood the atmosphere the show is going for, or at least was finally convinced by its mixture of general adolescent camaraderie and the magic of archery. This episode wasn’t categorically different or anything; Yamada is just an absolute master of atmosphere, and both of this episode’s tones leaned fully into her talents.

Sequences of our main team chatting idly after school were elevated through restless framing and plenty of incidental character acting, giving our protagonists’ light conversations a sense of solidity that they’ve often lacked in the past. Meanwhile, the sequences over at their rival school were given an almost mystic aura through the episode’s well-applied soft focus, consistent partial body closeups, and extreme focus on the actual sound of drawing and releasing an arrow. It also helped that this episode didn’t regularly try to be funny, which Tsurune isn’t particularly good at; it was more documentary than comedy-drama, simply cataloging incidental but emotionally charged moments one after another. Tsurune is a very unique mixture of genres that doesn’t always work, but this episode demonstrated that at its best, Tsurune is an elegant combination that can feel truly effortless in motion.