Mekakucity Actors - Episode 9

Mekakucity Actors has already woven a decidedly tangled web with its story thus far, and you can expect even more entanglement in this week's episode as Ayano steps up to reveal her angle to the story.

In short, it's Ayano's parents who seemingly discovered and researched the initial members of our group of red-eyed superpowered kids, taking them in as orphans at which point Ayano became a big sister to them, looking after them and helping them to overcome the fears caused by their abilities to integrate to some extent into the normal human world.  Ayano's parents were, of course, Mr. Tateyama and his wife, the latter of whom was later killed in a landslide.

Much later, Ayano discovers a notebook containing much of her mother's research, complete with some disturbring details on the possible origins of the strange powers sported by their adopted children - what's more, it seems that those powers have spread to her father, albeit only awakening at night to control him with a view towards creating a new "Medusa" using all of the world's snakes (I'm not making this part up, I promise).  As we switch from Ayano's own view of this story to one being related to Ene by Shuuya; a story that ultimately seems to reveal the location of Takane's actual body.

I'll admit that I'm hooked in by the reveal at the end of this week's Mekakucity Actors, but I really wish that the rest of the episode was up to that level - even ignoring its terrible CG opening (which I assume was rendered on an original PlayStation), the rest of the episode was an almost interminably plodding affair that had nothing to liven up its ceaseless monologues. It remains both disappointing and surprising that SHAFT, a studio that can traditionally somehow make the most verbose of stories engaging, have missed the mark so widely here, but I suppose you can't win them all.