After the “ending” of the main plot provided in the previous episode, I was expecting one final side story to take advantage of this show’s premise. Turns out, I was hoping for too much, as another main plot thread returned before taking several steps back. It was a somehow fitting way to end this series, which kept raising expectations, only to spend the rest of the time crushing them.

As a stand alone episode, this one had its moments. I took a liking to Machiko Himura, the poor girl with a paper delivery route, right away. Instead of being frail like the character from the original story, she was energetic and someone who took initiative for changing her fortune. By marrying into money, obviously. She was great fun when she was attempting to seduce Ryoushi, being the only one oblivious to how crazy she was acting and how much attention she was was drawing. It’s easy to like a character who is so delightfully delusional.

Unfortunately, things turned too quickly from, “I’ll engineer a situation to make you fall in love” to “Marry me, because you’re rich.” And with that came back to focus the Ryouko/Ryoushi romance story, which was handled shockingly poorly. It was, in a word, typical. That is to say, it was so much like every other tsudere/spineless loser relationship out there that I was surprised, if that makes any sense.

"I don't dislike him." Really, Ryouko? After all this time, is that all you have to say?

There was plenty of blame to go around. There was Ryoushi, who just let Machiko drag him along, instead of declaring the truth, which is that he already had someone else. There was Ryouko, who just let that happen and, in the end, simply had, “I don’t dislike him” to say about Ryoushi. I thought we had pushed past this phase in the last episode, that Ryouko had come to terms with being the person for Ryoushi. But no, I guess J.C. Staff couldn’t resist spending a full episode showing Ryouko as tsuntsun – that’s what the fans seem to like, after all, character development be damned.

His girlish moaning was insufferable in this scene. I thought Mr. Cat had given you Courage last episode?

All I wanted was a simple atomic episode to provide some laughs before the door finally shut on this series. But if episode 11 failed to provide closure, this one took a door that was nearly closed and forced it back wide open. My guess? The producers want this franchise to go places and to keep the fans coming back, and you don’t do that by providing an ending when the show, you know, ends. Oh, what the heck, the cynic in me knows that’s exactly why this show ended the way it did.

Series End

So another show comes to a close. I think I’ve written enough this week and last to show my distaste for the way things ended. The ending is, of course, the most important part of a story, though its failings can be excused if the quality of the ride leading up to it was good enough. Ookami-san and Seven Companions is not an example of such a piece of work.

To be sure, the ride had some fun moments. That first episode that had originally filled me with such hope was excellent, primarily thanks to its unique adaptation of the Cinderella story. Along the way, the show shone brightest during such adaptations, and episodes 3, 8, and 9 – ones whose primary content were straight up adaptations of fairy tales were my favorites. Other highlights include the Hansel and Gretel appearances, Ringo’s Three Little Pigs movie, and the Puss in Boots character and his speech impediment.

Big fan of this repeating gag. The 128-size font sells it.

But in between these flashes of brilliance was content that I would best describe as lacking. Episode 5 introduced a couple of intriguing plot threads: the social engineering experiment formed by the Otogi and Onigashima high schools and Ryoushi’s dark past involving Onigashima’s own president, Shirou Hitsujikai. The former was dropped and not touched upon again, while the latter just fizzled out after a couple of episodes were devoted to building it up while still showing almost nothing of it. As for the romance story between the two main characters, I would have said that they made a cute couple had everything ended in episode 11, but episode 12 brought them back to being just another one of those tsudere-girl-can-never-be-honest couples.

In short, the storytelling was just messy. Which wouldn’t have been a problem had the main plot not supplanted the more entertaining fairy tale adaptation portions of the show.

That said, I did like the final scene of the show. Something about the fire in Ryoushi's eyes.

I would be remiss not to mention the narrator to some extent. In short, she became annoying after about episode 3. Not because her act got old or tired, but because her act changed. Instead of providing the incisive, sarcastic, and occasionally witty nudge-and-a-wink type of commentary from the first episodes, she got relegated to the namesake of her role: she simply narrated what was literally happening, often speaking over the characters in the process. She had no personality anymore, or what she had was forced into hiding.

Ookami-san and Seven Companions was a show with a unique premise, one that carried the promise of something more than the typical high school romantic comedy. And when it embraced this difference and ran with it, it was a great show that did deliver on that promise. Unfortunately, it too often seemed afraid to do so, falling back to using typical genre staples and letting the more interesting, ambitious bits fall by the wayside. I looked forward to a new episode each week, hoping, “This will be the episode which finally brings everything together. This will be when the show finally starts.” I’m still waiting.

Was anyone else reminded of Black Rock Shooter's Mato Kuroi in the opening scene?