OK, give me one more week.

Let me state two things up front about Hikari no Ou:

• Kawai Kenji is the MVP here.  His influence on the mood is immeasurable.
• The fight scenes in this show seriously look like ass.  There’s no sugarcoating that fact.

As you know if you read last week’s post, I really wanted to make a firm decision on Hikari no Ou this week.  It’s pretty much the last bubble show I have this season.  But I’m just not there yet, partly because it’s reportedly getting “about 20 episodes” and as such, a commitment is not trivial (I could always drop it later but I kind of hate doing that).  I won’t say it’s “one step forward, two steps back” – sometimes it’s the opposite – but progress definitely isn’t unidirectional.

In some respects, for my tastes this was the best episode since the premiere.  There’s was less clumsy exposition and for most of its length, the animation (and stills) were not obtrusive.  Most of it was spent in the company of Touko and her survivor party, who are attacked in the woods on the way to the tree folk’s settlement.  Of course it can only be the Spiders who attack, using not Nen but blow darts.  Everyone makes it safely, in  part thanks to the efforts of Akira (Sakamoto Maaya) and her hound Temari.  Though using “hound” to describe a white chihuahua seems a bit incongruous.

Setting aside the idea of a chihuahua (who looks a bit like a bakenezumi) being a hunting dog, Akira is a nice addition to the mix.  Part of that is Sakamoto of course, who’s flat-out one of the best seiyuu there is, but she’s quite a grounded character with a fair amount of presence.  She agrees to – well, insists on – accompanying Touko, Kaho, and Shouzou to the capital as a bodyguard in exchange for some of Touko’s precious muku paper.  She also repeats the story of the Millennial Comet’s return, suggesting that among fire hunters at least this is a widely-held belief.

Meanwhile, a whole bunch of fire hunters are at the Yusoichi (put a balm on) mansion for a big shindig.  Koushi is a bit off his mettle, having had a disturbing dream about Hinako finding a vial of skyfire and being struck by lightning.  But his father’s former colleagues are pretty sympathetic to his situation.  Kira is more interested in the dogs, one of whom – some sort of wolfhound or deerhound – is unknown to her.  That’s because it belongs to Ruroku (Hosoya Yoshimasa), a party-crasher who specializes in hunting fallbeasts.  When Koushi asks him to teach him about skyfire, Ruroku invites the boy on a hunt, surely a momentous turn in Koushi’s arc.

The other major new introduction is Kun (Kokryu Sachi), who the Touko party finds abandoned and unconscious in the forest.  Kun is apparently a Spider child, which immediately raises Shouzou’s hackles but provides a potential source of information about the enemy.  Kun is notably not named after fire – in fact “Kun” is literally the most generic boy’s name one could have in Japanese.  And he’s not bashful about sharing what he knows either, including the fact that the Spiders become immune to fire by being bitten by a venomous bug.  It didn’t work on Kun, so his mother abandoned him to the woods.

After last week I was prepared to believe the Spiders being evil was a propaganda thing, but they look the part based on this ep. Apparently they’re responsible (via their ability to control flamebeasts) for the carnage the party finds on a beach where they hope to secure a boat for the capitol.  When those beasts attack again, Shouzou gets rather a bad injury.  This is the aforementioned awful fight scene – and I do mean distractingly bad, to the point where I really hope the series doesn’t have many more of them.  In any event the aftermath leaves the group is a bad way, on a small boat in the open sea with no food or fresh water.

Apart from that rough patch in the animation this is really all pretty decent.  I have issues with Touko being able to pick up a weapon she’s never used before (and is larger than she is), and kill a massive flamebear with one slash.  And the execution is just generally a bit stilted, as it has been since the second episode.  But the story itself still commands my interest, which is why this decision is so hard.  It’s surprising in a way that the execution is lagging the premise, given that Oshii Mamoru is apparently writing every episode personally, but that is what it is.  One way or the other I feel like I have to make a call after next week.