The more things change, the more they stay the same. If you watched the Hanasaku Iroha TV series you know pretty much what to expect from “Home Sweet Home”. In fact, the transition from the series is so seamless that it sort of has the effect of making it seem […] Read more
To say that I have mixed feelings about this is an understatement. HanaIro was very good at its best, but that wasn’t very often. Frankly, it should have been one cour to begin with – I worry that extending this to a second season could be a disaster, but BD/DVD […] Read more
You know, I’ve done quite a few of these series reviews by now – but this is a tough one to write. Seriously – how do I tackle a perplexing series like Hanasaku Iroha? I could talk about how it infuriated me with it’s preposterous failed attempts at slapstick. I […] Read more
I’ll be honest – I could spend a lot of time complaining about why this final episode of HanaIro being such a good one fills me with regrets about what might have been. But I won’t – instead, let’s celebrate the fact that the series ended on a lovely elegiac […] Read more
I guess it just wouldn’t be HanaIro if it didn’t take one (hopefully) last turn at pissing me off, which it did with a generally meh-diocre penultimate episode. Lest I give you the impression I thought this was a total disaster, I didn’t. As it so often has, the show […] Read more
Considering how intense last week’s episode was, this one was surprisingly low-key considering that it dealt directly with pretty much all of the outlying plot points. But it was effective for the most part, with the spotlight shining squarely on the wrinkled face (and…more) of Shijima Sui, final boss. The […] Read more
It pisses me off to no end that HanaIro can annoy me, irritate me, bore me and throw its laziness and stupidity at me for two months, then turn right around and make me love it again – just ‘cause it wants to. To paraphrase Wandering Dreamer – I’m not […] Read more
The optimist in me wants to be believe that HanaIro has finally gotten all the nonsense out of its system. The experiments with ecchi, the bad slapstick, the two-part episodes about egg dishes. Maybe, with a month of eps left, all that is behind us and the series will focus […] Read more
At long last, Hanasaku Iroha seems to have returned to the general vicinity of its actual plot. The 21st episode spent most of it’s time dancing around the fringes of it, warily shadow-boxing, occasionally making contact. But that’s closer than we’ve been for a long time, anyway. Because that’s what […] Read more
While it probably says a lot when when you’re watching an episode mostly to kill time while waiting to see if anything interesting happens in the preview, there were enough amusing moments scattered in this week’s HanaIro to make it watchable. Yes, they managed to do it – pretty much […] Read more