First Impressions / Grisaia no Kajitsu

「エンジェリック・ハウルI」 (Enjerikku Hauru I)
“Angelic Howl I”

Let’s have a round of applause for Suou Amane, this season’s winner of the One Harem Male Sweepstakes! Her victory actually took me by surprise; Yuuji had maintained a more or less platonic distance with the girls in all his routes, and I didn’t think that he was going to commit in the scope of this show. Well, he didn’t exactly commit, but a confession is about the highest you can score in anime. I wasn’t actually expecting anyone to win any points, so great commendations to Amane for actually getting to something resembling the finish line.

Alas, there’s no time to celebrate the victory, because we need to launch directly into Amane’s deep dark secrets and her motivations for pursuing this relationship with the gusto that she’s had. It’s strange that Yuuji only really pushes the question after he agrees to upgrade Amane’s girlfriend status, and his persistence does violate his personal No Prying rule (which, admittedly, is emphasised a bit less in the anime compared to the visual novel), but it is, normally, a logical course of enquiry. Yuuji’s right; Amane is an awfully ‘convenient’ woman, to the point of suspicion. Normally harem leads don’t question women throwing themselves onto them, so it’s good to see that Yuuji packs at least this much common sense. If someone tried as hard as Amane to be my de facto, I’d be wondering if there was a catch, too. The catch is: traumatic past! Not a big deal, right? That stuff never gets awkward.

Survival Horror

While Makina’s route may have exposed us most to Yuuji’s present work conditions and the one he called ‘master’, Amane’s has a stronger connection to his past, because it features, as main character, Kazami Kazuki (Tomonaga Akane), his sister. All of Yuuji’s self-assured smarmy was probably rubbed off on him by the older Kazami (who looks nothing like him). Part of the reason I liked Amane’s route in the original visual novel is Kazuki, whom I preferred over Yuuji in general. Narrator Yuuji had tendency for self-loathing melodrama, while Kazuki, whom we only see from Amane’s point of view, had a comforting snarky confidence. Frumpy Amane has her own charm too, and makes for a pleasant change of pace (and a necessary foil for Kazuki), even if her story is not at all a pleasant affair.

The entire disaster scenario is, admittedly at times, a bit contrived. It’s takes a bit of suspension of disbelief that a basketball training camp for schoolkids requires them to traverse The Most Dangerous Road in Japan (probably the same one as in Little Busters!). It’s a bit more to accept that it’s such a convenient deathtrap. It’s highly questionable to think that, if their bus flew off a cliff so high, any of them made it through the fall. Perhaps Angelic Howl is self-aware of how overplayed its premise is, because I could have sworn that at times it is framed like an old horror B movie. Popcorn might be appropriate. We already know that Amane’s supposed to be the only survivor, so we can already start taking bets on who dies first (not including those who didn’t make it past the preliminaries).

Fundamentally, though, what Amane and her peers are stuck in and how they got there is not really all that important. The point is to set up a Lord of the Flies scenario, and then let things play out from there. It is ulimately a human story, of vulnerable individuals dealing with (or failing to deal with) a harsh environment. It is a study of social interaction when society has been removed. There is potential for some gripping drama here. We’ve only passed the first day of Angelic Howl, and the ‘hell’, as Amane calls it, has only just begun. I’m looking forward to how they deal with the real meat of the story next week.

 

Full-length images: 02, 03, 05, 08, 13, 15, 23, ED3 01.

 

ED3 Sequence

ED3: 「Rainy veil」 by やなぎ なぎ (Yanagi Nagi)

End Card

38 Comments

    1. >] “I’m looking forward to how they deal with the real meat of the story next week.”

      Wait a minute…so does that statement foreshadow the possibility that…
      Show Spoiler ▼

      Because if that’s what actually happens next week (or if that really did occur in the VN)…yikes.

      Incognito
      Reply

    1. That’s hard to say in any VN because by their nature all the routes are “cannon”. Some have “true routes” but in the end since they are all part of the original they are all “cannon”

      Juan
      Reply

  3. You know when this anime started I could already feel that there would be dark tones. And well…there were…except that the story moved so fast we really didn’t get to feel the pain and heaviness. Most of them were finished before we could connect, I am wondering how they will handle this one. I was always curious about Amane’s route and now that it’s here I sincerely want to connect with it though I fear that it too might fly by too fast for that to happen.

    gawrshness
    Reply

  4. I think that it’s the visualization’s fault that the bus accident feels over the top. If only they draw the cliff a little bit lower and it’s not 90 degree steep (at least a little bit slanted), the bus will have some room decelerating via friction before the impact on the ground. That free fall 90 degree drop should’ve been killed everybody with the sudden impact on their body organs when they crashed to the ground..

    cryarc
    Reply

    1. Agreed. The bus crash was overplayed. This is partly due to the VN not being terribly descriptive with how the accident happened. (All you get is Kazuki’s deduction on it, which is the same animated.) But even if they ignored the fatality of the accident there’s still 2 dead already and 12 alive. The Girl with the fractures is pictured far worse in the VN and the chick with the stomach laceration is wearing an indestructible uniform which remained intact while her abdomen was cut. The President is nowhere nearly as obnoxious as she is in the VN but overall the material is there.
      It lacks the impact they gave with that 2 second glimpse back on episode 1 (blame it on C animation team. Angelic Howl needed to be animated by team A, I mean we got decent animation for the first part of the episode only to get a sudden drop in quality once AH began -.- )

      Helvetica Standard
      Reply

  5. While watching this, I didn’t think of Amane as having “won”, somehow. I guess because immediately after they start dating, Yuuji gets her to admit her ulterior motives. It almost comes across like he just went along with it, kissing her and agreeing to date her, so that he could get the truth out of her. Whereas that’s not how it goes in the vn. On the other hand, he did say “I like you” and clearly meant it.

    Anime Yuuji is just pretty hard to read. He seems totally emotionless most of the time. In the vn he’s really sarcastic and cynical most of the time. But then, in the vn you also get to hear his constant internal monologuing, so he was always going to be more of a cipher in the anime.

    Anyway, Angelic Howl is off to a good start. Kazuki is so cool. With two more episodes, I think they’ll be able to do it justice. The question is whether Angelic Howl is all they’ll adapt from Amane’s route, or if they’ll show what happens later, too. I think they should spend as much time as possible on Angelic Howl, and would rather they not get into the whole Show Spoiler ▼

    Tunafish Man
    Reply

  6. Show Spoiler ▼

    GoXDS
    Reply

    1. Actually it doesn’t need meteorite to make cellphone unable to receive signal, actually remote places far from tranceiver and uneven terrain (surrounded by mountains) could make the signal unavailable. I was a little bit surprised when Kazuki mentioned meteorite lol.

      Cryarc
      Reply

  7. So based on your word choice, I guess what we’re seeing is not Amane hallucinating the dead around her still being alive.
    Yes, that was my first guess.
    I don’t always enjoy my imagination.

    Erimaki
    Reply

  13. And here it is… the best and most heart wrenching route of the VN, Suou Amane and Kazami Kazuki’s past.

    I, for one, loves to reread VNs that i consider the best of the best. The only exemption to this is Kanon (it was sad as fuk! I cried like hell!), Kara no Shoujo (Touko deserves better damn it!), Song of Saya (awesome yet twisted as fuking hell!) and Grisaia no Kajitsu (simply because of Amane’s route)

    Ginobi47
    Reply

    2. You have my respect Gino-san, you need guts to play Song of Saya, a friend told me to give it a try years ago but after reseaching in Wikipedia I couldn´t even download the crazy thing. The Urobucher is far crazier than anybody could think.

      haseo0408
      Reply

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