Code Breaker - 10, 11

Getting round to watching this series has been rather difficult.

Code Breaker has had the misfortune of airing in an exceptionally strong season. An anime that's a little too cheesy and familiar, it never stood a chance against the other action series this season. These episodes did not help raise its status.

Episode 10

This was so cringe, you wouldn't believe. Hitomi's background story, courtesy of the manga, is plain terrible. Like something out of any movie ever made or badly written story of vengeance, it just reeks of mediocrity. My condolences to Yasuhiro Irie who was stuck with this source material; even he's not a magician.

If it weren't for that poor plot, this episode would have been fine. Kind of like a break before the final arc takes place, giving time for the Code: Breakers to gather and fight. It was nice to finally learn about the main villain of the anime, but for me it wasn't the most impressive display.

I'm not a fan of short anime explaining everything about one character in an episode. My preference is for the explanation to be done over the course of the entire anime, not just one flashback/reminiscence episode. In hindsight, this detail is too minor compared to the one above......

Episode 11

Monologue, camp fight scene, corny plot developments.......at least this episode was better.

I say better, but its really more enjoyable for myself. The series isn't exactly deep or intellectual, so all that campiness in this episode worked. I didn't care for the monologue but Heike and Toki's fight was pretty darn hilarious - like a bad version of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.

In terms of pacing, the episode was very slow. It did set up 3 different fights, so the pacing wasn't all bad but it wasn't an eye-catching episode. If you took away all that humour and animation, it would have been a rather boring episode just because it was slow.

Now the end is in sight. Pretty easy to guess what's in store for us, and it looks like more fighting will resume in the next episode