Tokyo Ravens Episode 17
What They Say:
Shaver suddenly attacks when Etou approaches Harutora and the others, and Harutora must find a way to stop him from causing any more damage.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Tokyo Ravens spent some decent time in the previous episode with Harutora filling in folks on what’s going on and exploring the bigger picture a little, but a lot of what we got was material from the background story that has been building in small increments that have not really garnered much interest. Unfortunately. Seeing Harutora with Reiji allowed him to get caught up in events and that worked to a good advantage overall, but it also shifted things a bit since it again reduced the young leads to being supporting characters. And the whole background storyline with the adults and their power plays, histories and conniving moments just continue to fall flat alongside that.
This episode at least gives us some decent action right from the start with the main group of people as we get Harutora, Natsume and Karahashi together only to be attacked on campus, which leads to a rather sprawling series of attacks. Shaver hasn’t been much of a character outside of a basic personality in the bit we’ve seen him, but he goes all out in attacking the group since he’s got some age and a good bit of skill. But with it all taking place on school grounds, everyone ends up coming to the rescue and before we know it, we have a decent sized group of the regulars finally asserting themselves and their position again. Having all of them go against Shaver works well, though they largely do their attacks one at a time, as we get to see someone who has little thought for the defenses they’re throwing up and is just kind of quietly relentless in his pursuit of them, which makes the students a bit frantic as they try the one-off defenses as Harutora and Natsume run away.
The back and forth works well as it goes on, but it obviously goes up a few notches when Natsume gets hit hard since that nearly drives Harutora into a frenzy. He does manage to keep his wits about him, but he starts to turn more on the offensive than anything else and that’s a decent change on his part since he’s usually reacting. It all works nicely in terms of layout and the action itself, and especially with Harutora finally finding his standing in things after it seems like everyone else already did, especially the more visible ones like Touji. But the show also wants to go more into the larger background story at the end, with the Raven Coat and the Twin Horn Syndicate, but once again it just feels so disconnected from everything in a weekly format that it comes across as uninteresting.
In Summary:
Another episode and more of potentially interesting material hampered by some very bad execution close to a dozen episodes ago. Tokyo Ravens lets its focus on Harutora work well here since he is the supposed lead of the ensemble cast, and we do get some good ensemble time as the kids all step up to protect him and Natsume, but it just all feels so pointless now with the way the story has been structured and the oversized cast of characters and background connections that just aren’t easy to keep up with on a weekly basis. I simply become more disillusioned with the show as it progresses.
Grade: C
Streamed By: FUNimation
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Apple TV via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.