All things considered, this show can be kind of charming. True, just about anybody who’s engaged with any sort of media has seen this plot a million times before, but for that one person who is experiencing the time-worn “plucky young outsider gets superpowers and steps up to save the day” storyline for the first time? They could have gotten far worse introductions to said tired outline that try less and achieve less than Shikizakura does. For the rest of us it remains the kind of thing where you can probably turn your brain off, but it’s acceptably entertaining in that regard.
So, Black Team has Kakeru and Ibara at their lair in city hall, leading to the first half of the episode being (aside from an out-of-place comedy routine as Kaede and Haruko attempt to worm their way in) a parallel conversation with Oka talking to her father about the issue of Kakeru and Ibara while Oka’s sister and her team interrogate Kakeru.
In this we see Oka and Kakeru placed in parallel, both wanting to believe that Ibara can be a force for good, and expressing a willingness to trust him. We also finally hear something about the title, as both conversations mention a “Shikizakura” ritual that could sever the connection between common reality and the Netherworld of the Oni. However, the ritual eight years before the present ended in disaster, specifically the great disaster of which Kakeru was the sole survivor, which also caused the Netherworld to come more in alignment with the human world instead, hence the current fairly constant battle against oni.
Kakeru talks a lot about friendship, and wanting to share peoples’ burdens and help them through their problems, but that gets Oka’s sister really mad as the talk on the other side reveals (to the audience, not Kakeru) that the next ritual time is coming up soon, in which Oka will take her role as shrine maiden, and that performing the ritual will claim Oka’s life.
All the same, Oka and Kakeru being firm in their belief (and a little help from Ryo in Oka’s conversation, building up Kakeru and Ibara as an asset) sees Kakeru granted a chance to prove that he’s worthy of defending the Shikizakura ritual from the inevitable Oni incoming. Before the test is actually given, Oka gets a chance to meet up with Kakeru. She shows him the supernatural mark of the shrine maiden that signifies her role (awkwardly but not indecently branded onto her chest) and while she doesn’t reveal what’s going to happen to her, they do have a good if brief talk that both puts their resolve in perspective and does a good job of building chemistry between the two of them.
It’s the small moments, to a degree, that are making this show work. There’s a point at the end of the “show off the brand” moment where Kakeru has to remind Oka that she might want to button up her blouse. This is a very obligate moment in the outline of a scene that has a lot of imitators in a lot of media – Oka is far from the first girl to show a somewhat awkwardly placed mark on her body to a boy with whom she has chemistry but who would not otherwise yet be ready to see her in even a mild state of undress. She might not even be the hundredth. This moment always runs a similar way because the boy (not knowing at first what he’s being shown) feels shame and surprise and the girl (who is making a very deliberate and non-sexual action despite the ease of misinterpretation) does not feel the same shame to the same degree or in the same form, so the boy will generally remind her at some point, likely attempting to at the start and successfully after the earnest moment about what she’s trying to show, that she should cover up.
There are a couple ways this could usually run: a little mutual blushing, increasingly severe embarrassment from the boy in the face of a more totally naive/oblivious girl, some slapstick or verbal abuse if the girl is a tsundere type… most of them are fairly stock. When the stock moment to end the stock scene comes in Shikizakura, Oka and Kakeru first do the “they’re both a little embarrassed” mild resolve… and then laugh it off together. This is a tiny little touch, a couple of seconds at most appended to a sequence that’s pure formula, does wonders for their characterization and chemistry. Oka and Kakeru are close enough to defuse the awkward situation by laughing together in an earnest and friendly way, and those fractions of seconds of the two of them laughing show us, rather than just trying to tell us, how comfortable they are as friends.
In any case, Kakeru and Ibara’s test is a combat test against Black Team’s big bruiser, to see if he’s really strong enough to hold the line at the Shikizakura ritual. Black Team’s leadership, including Oka’s father, are clearly intending Kakeru to fail and possibly even to die in battle in order to ensure that Ibara is neutralized, while Kaede and Haruko are there to cheer Kakeru on. Oka wants to be there cheering him on too, but her sister intercepts at least at the start.
Naturally, this is also a fairly stock sequence: the fight doesn’t go so well for Kakeru at first, but then he and Ibara find greater resolve within themselves and pull a comback that forces them to be judged worthy. Again, if you think you’ve seen this before, you may have watched an anime in the past. But, again, for that one person who hasn’t watched an anime before and has to judge the sequence just for itself? It’s kind of alright, both because these overused patterns got popular for a reason (there being a basic flow of drama that works) and because the particular execution in Shikizakura is… competent.
The fighting is good. The fighting in Shikizakura has always been at least decent, taking advantage of how easy it is to get CGI rigs to move in impressive ways, having both speed and clarity. Faced with a human opponent rather than the depressingly generic Oni, we actually get to see a nice variety of choreography as well. Black Team’s bruiser is much, much larger than Kakeru/Ibara and the direction actually utilizes that size differential to make for some good images and creative combat moves where the big guy either really throws his weight around, Ibara utilizes his relative small size and high agility, or the interplay of sizes necessitates some different moves.
The combat also has more than the one big turnaround. That’s there, but it’s not all Ibara getting the tar beaten out of him before and Ibara winning hard after. In the early stages, Kakeru and Ibara are challenged repeatedly, and while they’re more often on the back foot, they do put up a fight and legitimately struggle for victory. After the turnaround the fight is called very shortly, but it’s not as though the big guy gets humiliated – one of the judging parties intercedes, declaring that Kakeru has proved enough, so we don’t see more than a few blows exchanged post-epiphany. Those blows we see, though, still have interplay to them, even if Kakeru and Ibara clearly have the advantage.
This is, when you get down to it, everything you need for good action. There are stakes and investment (even if plot armor has per-determined the outcome) in that we don’t want Kakeru to lose and Ibara to get sealed. There’s some extra drama in that Oka desperately wants to reach out and support Kakeru as she can, with the dramatic irony that she and the audience know her card is marked and Kakeru doesn’t. The action moves well, it looks good, has a real back-and-forth, and the banter between the big guy, Kakeru, and Ibara does touch on issues for the characters, particularly the question of resolve and what these people are fighting for. The big guy to eliminate oni, Kakeru to be a hero who’ll save whoever he can save, and Ibara… well, Ibara’s first answer to that question is just that he likes fighting, but that brings us to the epiphany turnaround.
The getting to that point is fairly standard, if well-executed: Kakeru and Ibara have enough fight in them to force the big guy to get serious and bust out his energy axe rather than just his bare-handed combat moves, but not enough to really handle that. They get knocked down, and the big guy prepares an execution blow. Kakeru’s friends, particularly Oka forcing herself into line of sight past her sister, call out for him to stand up, and we cut to the mindspace with Kakeru and Ibara that we’ve seen before.
In that space (where we can sort of accept that time isn’t really passing in the outside world, allowing there to be a conversation), Kakeru talks to Ibara. Ibara seems put out, but also accepts, grumpy though he is, that he’s going to sleep for another few centuries. He also reveals that he doesn’t really remember who he is or why he fights, and that he mostly lashes out trying and failing to fill the emptiness and void of purpose inside himself with violence. Kakeru ultimately reprises the “two ways out of this” speech that Ibara gave him in Episode 1 and he turned around on Ibara in episode 2, now taking a mutual form where, rather than accepting loss, they’re going to stand up and fight for their mutual sakes. In real space, Ibara/Kakeru parries the strike and stands once again, much to the joy of Kakeru’s friends, and pulls out a second level transformation on one of his arms, manifesting a very large and intimidating power fist to strike back against their foe. After a few blows, that’s when the fight is determined to be over, much to Ibara’s frustration as it was getting fun for him.
Formally, Kakeru is accepted as being worthy and useful as a guard of the ritual, but it’s clear in the postscript that Oka’s father may still be plotting something to eliminate Ibara. Standard stuff. We also get a scene where Ryo’s mother talks to Kakeru, advancing Ryo’s backstory by revealing formally (not that we couldn’t guess) that Ryo’s father was killed by a Shinja, leading to his Flame-Haze-like personal pursuit of all Oni. Why Kakeru needed to know this now at the end of an episode where Ryo stood up for him (in his own way) rather than really going into Ryo’s hatred I don’t know. Presumably the Shinja in question is going to show up soon. But the show decided that now was the time, so we got that and it was less sloppy than it could have been. We’ll see just how relevant the detail is going forward from here.