We’re arriving at the turn, folks! With the season nearly three quarters done, we’ve reached that brief sequence of around two weeks where it feels like every story I’m following is catching fire at once. As reliable as verse-chorus-verse-chorus, stories tend to put their characters through the toughest ringer at around the three-quarters mark, all leading into the triumphant rise towards the final conflict. Whether it’s Run with the Wind’s Hakoden trials, Mob’s Claw attack, or Kemurikusa’s final journey into the fog, our heroes are currently suffering through that ringer, and doing their best to entertain us all the while. Let’s celebrate their journeys as we run down one more week in anime!

This week’s JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure felt like a fine demonstration of both Golden Wind’s best and worst qualities, while still standing as a thrilling installment in this journey on the whole. On the positive end, Bucciaratti’s desperate escape from King Crimson was incredibly intense, and successfully embraced how terrifying of a power Crimson truly is. It almost feels like this is Araki taking another stab at a power like The World, but combining the sheer terror of such a power with the vastly improved sense of action storytelling and ensemble drama he’s developed since. Additionally, the sequence of Bucciaratti’s crew making their own choices about his decision felt totally convincing – we didn’t just run through a canned “of course we’re still with you,” and instead his teammates genuinely acknowledged the severity of the step they’re taking.

On the other hand, the theoretical interplay of Sticky Fingers, Gold Experience, and King Crimson falls so far into nonsensical Stand-magic territory that at this point, I couldn’t even guess at what’s going on with Bucciaratti. Giorno fixed him, but then it didn’t work, because he became a ghost, but then he came back to life again, but at this point he’s maybe a zombie? This ambiguity isn’t an exciting hook I’m actively engaged by – it’s just a reflection of how poorly defined Giorno’s power is, and how clearly its ability to successfully resolve any given situation will always be determined arbitrarily. Gold Experience itself is pretty clearly this arc’s weakest variable, and by leaning the crux of this drama on understanding precisely how and why it works, the show is making it very difficult to invest in Bucciaratti’s situation.

The Magnificent Kotobuki pulled out all the stops this week, forgoing much significant character focus to instead offer one of its most elaborate and thrilling vignettes to date. Pretty much every episode of The Magnificent Kotobuki feels like listening to a kid breathlessly recount their most recent Lego battle (in a good way), and this episode’s mix of aerial combat, hostage drama, explosions, and even gunplay was a brilliant riff on the format. It was great to see characters like Johnny the bartender and that dang dodo get their moment in the sun, and the escalation across this episode never felt contrived – one disaster always led naturally into the next, making the cast’s journey from traditional dogfighting to sabotaging their own blimp feel smooth and propulsive. From its comedy to its action to its copious character payoffs, this episode demonstrated The Magnificent Kotobuki’s clear dedication to being the best serial pulp adventure pastiche it possibly can be.

Cathartic arc payoff after cathartic arc payoff awaited us in this week’s Run with the Wind, as we fought through the first three segments of the Hakoden relay. The structure of this relay means the last act of this show is essentially going to be a circuit paying off our affection for each of these characters in turn, and Prince, Musa, and Jota all turned in fine performances as the first wave in this process.

Each of these characters essentially went through one key conversation, be it either with a friend or themselves, that seemed to best define what they brought to this production. For Prince, it was his beautifully pointed discussion with Haiji, where he embraced everything he found inspirational about his own heroes, and told Haiji that as an athlete, he didn’t want to be pitied – he wanted to win. Then Musa shared that heartfelt phone call with Takashi, and Jota revealed how seriously he’d been engaging with his feelings on his brother’s talent… it was all terrific stuff, both building on all the sturdy architectural work this narrative has accomplished, and also demonstrating its line-by-line intelligence at the same time. Run with the Wind has been so reliable that I’ve at times taken it for granted, but it feels on track to be one of the best sports anime of recent years, and perhaps even one of the better entries in the genre altogether.

Kemurikusa maintained its bizarre blend of slice of life charm and apocalyptic despair this week, as our intrepid heroes crossed fully into the land of the red fog. The first segment of this episode was once again dedicated to simply conveying the fatigue of our leads and strange beauty of this world, as a montage of shots led us through an assortment of evocative ruins, leading into our reunion with Wakaba’s little beeping robot friend.

Kemurikusa’s animation obviously isn’t “traditionally impressive,” but I found myself kinda stunned by how well the combination of cute noises and adorably awkward movements managed to humanize these robots. Considering they were introduced and lost within no more than five or six minutes, gaining a sense of sympathy for these little robots required some extremely efficient characterization, and I think their combination of wonderfully clumsy movements and fatalistic “please give us a mission we can be proud of” philosophy managed it. Kemurikusa remains a perpetually surprising exercise in dramatic minimalism.

Mob Psycho 100’s latest episode was actually one of its most conservative execution-wise, in spite of covering some seriously consequential and fast-paced material. That was likely intentional; although this episode covered a major paradigm shift in Mob’s world, and even featured our boy himself hitting one more 100%, it was ultimately more about conveying narrative information than some emotional experience. Scenes at both Claw headquarters and Reigen’s base did their best to mask heavy exposition with conversation and power demonstrations, but there were plenty of smaller pleasures to be found, like the careless intensity with which Mob used his powers, or the steady affirmation of what good parents Reigen and Dimple have become. We couldn’t have asked for a clearer demonstration of Dimple’s genuine concern than him throwing himself in the face of a Mob explosion for the boy’s sake – that act alone confirmed him as a necessary member of this season’s strangest superheroic team.