Area no Kishi - 3 (Suguru, No I Mean Kakeru)

Aim: Not to use the phrase "emotional roller coaster"

This episode will put you through an emotional........... ride of some sort.......... well yeah, should have just used roller coaster.

The episode literally put the pedal to the metal when it came to the speed of the progression; speeding along not only Kakeru's character development but the entire course of the story line. During this episode because you witness the death of a sibling, then the entire background story of Kakeru, Suguru and Nana, topping it all off with the aftermath of the surgery and Kakeru's rehab you get the feeling that the abundance of information cannot have possibly been crammed into just 20 minutes. Not to mention, when it came to emotion, this episode took the top spot in any third episode of anime.

Seriously there was not a moment in this episode where you cannot be caught off guard by a sudden rush of emotions. It didn't help much that there were a plethora of flashbacks to happier childhood memories of the brothers, which managed to amplify the sadness of the situation even more during the cutbacks to reality and made even more worse when we are shown how the even has effected both the family, Nana and Kakeru's close friends. This was all well done though and even though it left me sad and yes, possibly on the verge of tears, it did remain a good episode (probably because of how it made me feel, I'd guess it was a hint to the strength of the episode).

Kakeru's post-accident part of the story seemed rather uneventful and kept to a very shonen-like generic (but in cases like this almost unavoidable) path - I'm not sure I liked the whole thing with a member of the football team not being able to move since he got the same "chill" as when facing Suguru, though not implying anything, could lead to an interpretation that this is all due to Suguru's heart which now (literally) resides within Kakeru.

The wind-down of the episode was a little easier to cope with on an emotional scale; just a nice and cool shonen football moment displaying Kakeru's skill and potential as a football player - that being said this event does occur after another heartfelt chat with Nana about his decision to leave the football club. I would have to say that how Kakeru will find out about a transplant will be an interesting development to the story and I really do hope it doesn't end up being Nana for the sole reason that this will cause the anime to follow a more stereotypical route.

So far this anime has completely overwhelmed me with it's pace and even though might expect it to slow down after an episode like this, next weeks preview begs to differ; evidently we will be witnessing the introduction of a rival.