Shakugan no Shana III: Final – Review

So that’s why the series ignored common sense at every twist and turn…

Shakugan no Shana Final: Omnipotences As Plot-Device

Looking back I’m quite proud of myself to have gotten through three underwhelming seasons of Shana and Yuuji bitching around. Sensible people would probably have stopped watching this after the first episode of the first season but well, at some point you gotta commit yourself. You can’t just cop out in the middle of it and give up. I mean, I was curious as to see how the series would present the blatantly obvious happy ending and how it would explain it (and doing a bad job of doing that of course). But here we are at the end of the franchise (hopefully). I would even go so far as say that this is the best season of the three which doesn’t mean that it’s good in any way naturally.

Shakugan no Shana III – 09 Review

I think, everyone will agree that leaving a miserable office worker like Felcor in charge of defending the headquarters was a really bad idea…

Shakugan no Shana III Episode 09 – Miracles Happen If You Pester God Long Enough

So while the leader of the bad guys embark on their mysterious journey to Fairy-Wonderland, Nirvana or whatever this series calls it, the good guys manage to surprise the bad guys by appearing out of nowhere. People usually don’t do that, appearing out of nowhere, I mean. But what people usually do in Shounen-series is killing monsters and the Flame-Hazes do plenty of that in this episode. Meanwhile the war in the rest of the world is getting so exciting that we don’t get to see anything of it. Far more interesting, the writers thought, was showing us that Flame Hazes own an airline and travel around in a nice private jet while joking and pondering the contents of Vanilla-pudding.

Shakugan no Shana III – 03-05 Review

The worst thing about this remark is that it wasn’t a meta-fictional joke – despite that it is one. This series takes itself far too serious overall forgetting how generic and cliché the whole plot actually is.

Episode 03: Yuuji In Search Of Lost Time
Episode 04: Yuuji Is… ‘Nobody’s Hero’ (A Generic Tale About Stuff Someone Does But Shouldn’t Actually)
Episode 05: Shana’s ‘I Need To Be Rescued’-Blues

Well, waiting some episodes to write a review of three episodes showed me that Shana III actually doesn’t go anywhere – except it will do just that… in the far distant future, that is. Yuuji probably must be the least evil villain of this season with his ignorant and naive attitude towards killing a few hundred people to change the world. Five episodes and the Great Epic War is still in planning. Why? Because it’s so exciting to debate endlessly apparently. The bad guys just enjoy debating endlessly about their strategy without ever doing anything. It’s just like they want to become a bunch of stoic philosophers sitting on their asses whining about the state of the world while pondering about the advantages of whining. Shana III won’t excite you but it will teach you that apparently love is a poor motivation for a war-story.

Shakugan no Shana III – 02 Review

Oh, cry me a river… Just get on with it, goddamnit! You’re trying to kill her, you know! And that has nothing to do with having a polite conversation about the good ol’ times…

Well, imagine someone tries to give you really good advice and tells you: ‘Compare cheese and sushi, it’s often the latter that smells worse if you give it some time. But smell it the day each of them is created – and you may think different.’. So ponder about that for a while and what kind of advice this is. Let’s not make it too exciting and let me just tell you what it means: Time changes things. Simple as that. And this is the kind of dialogue you get to hear in Shakugan no Shana III’s second episode. So, if you like persons who when they want to tell you simple facts about time start talking about cheese and sushi then this very well may be the kind of episode you like to see. For the rest I can just advise to be patient because Yuuji has a plan – and it doesn’t involve the Toothfairy and the Marshmallow Man.

Shakugan no Shana III – 01 Review

Well, I guess, it’s not like any shounen-series had a training-arc that included a strategy-session before… I might as well just accept that cavemen-crudeness simply works best sometimes.

Like predicted the third series of Shana tries to be a real tearjerker. After sitting through a lot of lamenting and reminiscing I can tell you this hint about the biggest plot-twist of this episode: Yuuji is a derp. He certainly didn’t become Mr. Darcy-material even after his… change.