天下制覇

Which means no more Kuze ever. Whew…

Impressions:

Well, it’s over. Not a horrible ending, though I felt pretty much no closure on the Kuze/Mizuki side whatsoever. They timeskip to Christmas (well, I honestly don’t remember when the surgery was taking place, but I assume "Not-Christmas") and everybody is living happily ever after. Yuuko finally appears in front of Yuu to recap all the relationships they helped for the second time in as many episodes and then disappears. The end! Not happy, but at least there’s closure. Mizuki, on the other hand, spent about as much time talking with Yuu about the past as she did singing with Kuze. Oh well, it’s not like I expected their arc to suddenly stop sucking at any point.

At any rate, it served its purpose as an ending and was still one of the better episodes of the series, so I can’t complain too vociferously (triple word score). I’m not certain that they could have done much to have turned around my opinion on Kuze/Mizuki’s arc in the eleventh hour, or ‘fix’ the Yuuko’s nonsensical death, but at least they managed to put together something wrapping everything up and putting a final bullet point on the whole ordeal. All that, and they did it in the usual 21 minutes of show too. 
Yes, I really am still annoyed about the 6 minutes of OP and ED last week.

Final thoughts at the bottom.

ef Final OP/ED

Final Thoughts:

Ef suffered early on from pacing problems, and never really recovered from them. Kuze and Mizuki were immediately thrust into an endless cycle of angsting over… the fact that he was angsting while Yuu and Yuuko’s story slowly plodding along. Then the present day arc came to a complete stop while still eating up the same amount of screen time while the past arc hit its full emo stride. It certainly was presented much much much better and Yuuko was a far more pitiable character than Kuze, but it also suffered quite a bit from an unsympathetic male lead. Add to this dilution of the characters and essentially space filler from the previous arc’s cast and except taken in very small parts, the story was really all over the place. There were powerful scenes, sure… but as often as not, they were spaced between scenes that were tiresome at best. Some very repetitive direction also didn’t help matters much. It certainly got better in the later going, but I seriously can’t remember a single important or interesting scene from episodes 1-6 or so. The violin burning? Or was that later. Who knows.

If you pick and choose, and almost completely ignore Kuze/Mizuki’s story, then you could probably string together a nice little hour or so coda to the original series, but I’d hesitate to call this a particularly worthy sequel. There was really nobody for the audience to empathize with, and every character was so wracked with personal problems from the very start that there was never really any attempt to make them attractive to the audience. Instead, we’re just thrown into a psychological mess of a crockpot with flashing colors and random German thrown up on the screen and expected to feel for characters who are all one neurosis short of embarking on a murder/suicide rampage.

It wasn’t horrible, but it was a pretty disappointing sequel all around and I think that if it didn’t have Shaft behind it, nobody would have even given it a second look. Without Shinbo’s random filters and smattering of German, all that’s left is a bunch of crazy people being led around by the undead. On second thought… how could that formula go wrong? C’est la vie.