Saturday 28 September 2013

il sole penetra le illusioni ~ Day Break Illusion - Episode 13 (Completed)

As all and sundry around her try to save Akari from Cerebrum's plan, Akari herself seems to be at breaking point in her psychological battle with her own painful memories as she relives Fuyuna's descent into a Daemonia over and over again.

However, breaking point or not she seems to have reached a breakthrough in terms of her understanding of Fuyuna and why things transpired the way that they did.  Although this understanding can't change Fuyuna's fate, it does allow to Akari to reconcile her feelings and actions, thus avoiding the situation which Cerebrum was relying upon to further his plan.


Now that said plan is in tatters, Cerebru has little choice but to attack Akari directly, although unfortunately for him this is also the moment where the hard work of her comrades sees Akari sprung from her prison.  With Cerebrum's attempts to psychologically attack this group of magical girls falling upon deaf ears, he instead turns to attacking them using his true form, leaving us a big old battle between this sentient Daemonia and the group of magical girls to bring the series to a climax.

Having tried to quietly but deliberately hype itself up as a dark magical girl series, Day Break Illusion's target was obvious - what a shame though that it missed it by miles.  There were certainly some decent enough ideas to be found here, but they were all for naught in the face of clumsy character development, poor pacing and messy story-telling, leaving you with a series where you could always second-guess what was going to happen next; without any surprises, there was really nothing left to the series to keep the viewer on-board.  In that sense, this bland finale underlines exactly how off-track this series managed to go, and come the end of it all it's hard to really pinpoint anything that it succeeded in doing.

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