Steins;Gate

Still confused by the opening stanzas ofSteins;Gate? Well then, try wrapping your head around this next sequence of events: pseudo-scientist Rintarou Okabe continues to be freaked out by what happened (or didn't happen?) to him recently. The girl whose bloody corpse he discovered is, in fact, alive and well, and adding to the confusion is that she's now giving a lecture on time travel, rather than the professor who claimed to have mastered it last episode. Hopelessly mind-boggled by all this, Okabe hops online to look up time-traveling urban legend John Titor ... only to find that Titor's sensational visit to the year 2000 has been scrubbed off the internet. Has Okabe entered a reality where the Titor thing never happened? And what to make of his experiment at the Future Gadget Lab, where an attempt to microwave a banana seemingly sends it back in time?

By clarifying which events have happened and which didn't, this episode provides a more coherent follow-up to the first, while still spinning the wheel of mystery as to whether Okabe dreamed it, or time-slipped, or something else entirely. Certainly, it's more balanced than the maddening quick-cuts and non-sequiturs of Episode 1—although some running time is still wasted on pointless events like Okabe stopping by a shrine to chat with friends, and a run-in with a passer-by looking for an antique PC. Who knows, maybe that stuff does become important later, but it lacks the suspense needed to hold one's attention.

Regardless of the plot's hits and misses, however, the overall atmosphere of the series keeps everything afloat, with visuals and audio conspiring to form a unified artistic whole. Muted colors and hazy lighting establish a strange, intriguing vision of Akihabara in midsummer, and even ambient sounds (cicadas chirping, cars whizzing by) seem to echo the detached paranoia of Okabe's world. If Episode 1 was the act of throwing all the jigsaw pieces on the floor in mad confusion, then here begins the riveting process of putting them together.

Originally posted by Carlos Santos of animenewsnetwork.com

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The World God Only Knows S2

There may have been some doubts about the hackneyed premise that began the second season of The World God Only Knows—tough martial arts girl secretly likes cute things!—but with Episode 2, all those doubts are swept away. The excellent conclusion to the Kusunoki Kasuga arc sees our hard-nosed heroine going on the World's Most Awkward Date with smug, game-obsessed protagonist Keima Katsuragi. Granted, this charade is simply an attempt to make Kusunoki confront her "weak" side and force out the "loose soul" that's bothering her, but the laughs just keep coming: Keima's unabashed selfishness at the game store, an overly physical round of whack-a-mole (or rather, lobster), even a hilariously uncomfortable moment in the purikura booth. The genius is in seeing all these dating-sim clichés subverted by two completely unwilling participants.

And that's just the halfway point. The real payoff comes when our uneasy couple engages in the ultimate display of sentimental romantic goop—a shared ice cream cone—and the loose soul pops out to battle Kusunoki, switching from comedy spoof to pure action in seconds. Then comes the emotional punch: Keima, Elsie and Kusunoki launch into a passionate, thoughtful discussion about how to accept different sides of one's personality—and finally resolve it in a heartfelt way only this series can pull off so well.

Between the great genre send-up, the slickly animated hand-to-hand combat, and a heartwarming turnabout in the final act, this episode shows incredible storytelling range. And that's not including all the little things it does right: Elsie's background sight gags, color schemes that shift to match the mood, rich background music that walks a careful line between spoof and seriousness. It doesn't even have to throw around otaku in-jokes at this point—instead it relies charming characters, pitch-perfect comedy, and a lot of heart to tell its story. A story that'll be well worth watching, all the way to the end.

Originally posted by Carlos Santos of animenewsnetwork.com

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