I won’t say that Shikizakura exactly did well, but it did display a basic understanding of the facts I was talking about last week. To its limited credit, the show clearly knows at least some of what it needs to do, it just doesn’t do it all that well.
To that end, this episode was mostly dedicated to the development of Power Suit Yellow (Kaede) with a side of Power Suit Purple (Haruko), the two that really had absolutely no personality after the first two episodes. In this one, we get their development: Kaede was a high school sports star until, eager for victory in a high jump competition, she fell prey to an Oni. However, she was able to resist the possession while heroes showed up to battle the monsters, earning her a place on the team. This is apparently the normal recruitment pool: people who throw off their own possession via willpower alone. It’s quickly made clear that our lead is a bit of a different case, but whatever.
Haruko, meanwhile, was the team’s ‘manager’ and is and was clearly emotionally close with Kaede. The exacts of her recruitment are left in the dark for now, but it’s clearly related to that. We also see some of their personalities in this. Kaede is, as you’d expect from the sporty one, kind of brash and intense while Haruko lives up to her “Glasses and sweater” combo by being more kindly and reserved.
In any case, we open on the present with a fight with some oni who were driving a man to jump to his death from a tall building. Wing oni appear in this fight, and though they’re still little more than paragoombas they at least get us some visually interesting aerial dogfighting. One of them gets away, though, which causes Kaede to blame herself and get angry, exceptionally so when confronted with Kakeru’s chipper idiocy.
After Kaede and Haruko leave a team meeting early (missing Kakeru’s pizza party, which was a quite impressive affair for terminally-sheltered Oka), Kakeru ends up running into Haruko, getting part of their story, and giving Haruko a somewhat moronic but also kind of insightful pep talk that allows her to face up to Kaede better.
That’s in good time, though, as Kaede has a run-in with her former track team rival, a young lady who’s exceptionally peeved at Kaede having quit the team (which she did out of guilt for using oni power to complete a high jump). As you could probably guess from her general hostility meaning she’s full of negative emotions, she falls prey to Oni herself, forcing Kaede to get to work trying to save the soul of her friend/rival. Everyone else shows up, but the main battle is all down to Kaede and Haruko dealing with the flappy oni to rescue their former friend while the boys are kept busy with generic mooks in the background. In the process the two girls come to trust each other and Kaede even masters her wing suit power suit to actually fly. The day is saved, Kaede is able to mend her relationship with her track team rival, and having heard about Kakeru’s little speech even makes friends with him (resulting in a drink exchange that both Haruko and Kakeru’s roommate are shocked to see).
So, we got some important elements here. We got personalities for Kaede and Haruko, we saw at least one more form of oni, and we actually saw oni manipulate peoples’ emotions in a way that came across better and made more sense than the ones that attacked Kakeru in episode 1. All in all, it tried to do just about everything that episode 3 needed to do… it just didn’t do it all too well. The Wing Oni are new and different and kind of promise that we might get better thought-out action going forward, but on their own are still uninspired monster designs that would be mostly fit as filler enemies. We saw the Oni playing on the desires of both Kaede and her sports rival, but the seductive element of the demonic offer is still kind of weak.
It’s terribly easy to compare the Oni operating on that scale to Madoka’s witches. And, while we didn’t exactly dive into the inner feelings and descent of the people the witch of Episode 4 was targeting (the ones drawn to attempt mass suicide by chemical fumes), in part because Witches are somewhat brute force regarding that aspect, we did at least already know and care about one of the potential victims, Hitomi, and understand her relationship with Madoka and why we should care about what happened to her. The rival in this episode is essentially introduced as a character one scene before she’s taken by Oni, in a way that indicates she’s pretty obviously primed to fall. The Madoka version wouldn’t have worked as well if Hitomi had only been introduced in the scene where Madoka meets her on the walk that ultimately leads to the attempted suicide site. Not to mention, there are a ton of other emotional arcs being successfully juggled at that point which keep the viewer invested. It’s almost hard to believe that this is already episode 3 of Shikizakura while that was only episode 4 of Madoka; volumes upon volumes more were done with both story and character in a better show with better writing, even treading in similar conceptual space.
That said, it really is unfair to compare other shows to Madoka. Shikizakura doesn’t have to live up to quite that level to be competent or even good. At the moment? It’s teetering on the edge of competence, which is fair enough all things considered. I don’t love this show, but I can see having fun with it as something relatively basic in both its ambition and execution. We’ll see just how long it can keep that going.