Forum - View topicREVIEW: Lord El-Melloi II's Case Files: Rail Zeppelin Grace note Special
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ThatMoonGuy
Posts: 364 |
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I think the biggest hit in this episode is doing what Adventures, the light novel sequel to Case Files, is doing: sideline the magical mysteries a bit in favor of more character exploration. I loved Case Files for its weird and convoluted mysticism but it's not something most people could really get into. It required a lot of interest and precious knowledge of too much stuff. But the characters and conflicts here are interesting by themselves so they can work and make an interesting story. Magic, I think, is best used when it's a metaphor, a symbol of something in the story.
This story is rather simple but I can understand the feeling of not being confident about what one turned out to be. But stating stuck in the past is no good, as the episode concludes.vi just wish some people would take this lesson to heart. |
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dm
 Subscriber Posts: 1487 |
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I wish all this lore was more accessible to English-speaking people who prefer to read paper instead of text crawling across a computer screen (I suppose I need to check again). It all sounds so intriguing.
But speaking as a Type-Moon semi-literate, this was an enjoyable episode all the same. As I watched the scenes with Touko Aozaki I was reminded of Nisioisin's Zaregoto series and the character Aikawa Jun --- complete with red hair, exaggerated powers, and a fancy sports-car in the end --- to the point that the two series were blending together in my subconscious (I know the next time I read from the series, I'll be seeing Touko Aozaki in my mind's eye during all the Aikawa scenes). |
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AQuin1904
Posts: 270 |
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I'm guessing that Touko is in the special because she's the most important character from the three books that the anime skipped who wasn't featured in the short stories that the anime added for its first half. Touko was a major character in books 2 and 3 (the Izelma case that characters mention in this special), and she alsospoiler[ returns to do some important things in the final case, which wraps up the storyline that "Rail Zeppelin" started.] I missed her in the TV series, so I'm glad to see her show up here, but her appearance definitely feels more like fanservice than a necessary plot element.
As a double-length episode, this felt more like the novels than most of the additions to the anime, but the limited time still leads to some key principles only being explained at the end, which makes it less effective as a mystery. The novels generally feature a lecture on some magecraft concept early on and then give you enough time for it to stop being fresh in your memory before applying parts of it to solving a case. They're not fair-play mysteries by any stretch of the definition, but they do offer the reader some room for puzzle-solving fun. This is kind of a nitpick, but I'm not a fan of how many of the anime-only cases involve Gray using her trump-card. It felt a lot more special in the novels when whole books (and sometimes multiple books in a row) would go by without it showing up. spoiler[It also helped sell how serious the risks are supposed to be later.] |
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SrkSano
 Posts: 205 |
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I thought this was a fun episode. Watched most of the Fate anime and I believe this is the first time I've really seen Touko. General Fate anime spoiler - spoiler[You see her from behind in the third Fate stay/night Heaven's Feel movie, Rin and Sakura go to her shop to get Shinji's new body and they pass her by.]
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Stelman257
Posts: 317 |
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Touko is cool as hell but I do find it whacky she's meant to be this sorta semi-antagonist in most of what she shows up in, but in Garden of Sinners she's basically just Nick Fury lmao. Mission command and helps out Mikiya and Shiki sometimes when some mages are doing dumb ass stuff.
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b-dragon
Posts: 503 |
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Its something that's communicated kinda weirdly across the different media, but Touko's always presented as lacking a degree of conventional morality, and is more slave to her own interests/desires. Sometimes that makes her ally, other times not so much. For Shiki/Mikiya, she had some financial motivation (officially her office was a investigator's iirc), and fondness for/curiosity about the pair. |
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MFrontier
Posts: 14362 |
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Gotta be honest, I have never heard Yuko Kaido with a softer, higher pitch, compared to her normal voice so watching her play a demure teenager was kind of surreal.
I wonder if they'll dub this OVA and finally give Touko an official English VA before they (presumably) do for the Mahotsukai no Yoru movie. |
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DangerMouse
Posts: 4007 |
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Really hope they do. |
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Stelman257
Posts: 317 |
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Yeah I figured as such, that she's just very motivated by self interest and like many mages in Type Moon verse the morals behind that it don't really matter haha. Thanks for clarifying it though, seems like she's still one of the "better" mages if she's only selfish and morally questionable not outright evil at least! |
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