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Last episode, we got to see all of the virtual idol stuff pay off as they revealed an anime adaptation. Of what? The idols. Their daily lives? I don’t know. Ask them.

My Thoughts

The episode starts with Rie walking into a pole. That’s literally it. So, I want to point out that this episode is actually called “Final Episode,” which is likely what I’ll call the review for the sake of the joke, but this isn’t actually the final episode. There’s one more. That one is called “The End of the Beginning” because that’s better than Final Episode, I guess.

This is the first episode that seems to be wrapping things up with purpose. There are talks of continuing with Boken Survivors. Bloom Ball is in its final episode, and that idol anime is getting made, which is still odd. Everyone’s busy and getting to work, but Rie doesn’t seem to be too confident in her voice acting. I feel like her losing confidence has been the focus of like three episodes now.

Of everything, though, I really have to laugh at Haruna. She was the most important character by far at the beginning with the biggest dreams, but she’s been reduced to basically nothing. I think she actually accomplished the least of all the characters here. She has a named character that shows up in some episodes of Bloom Ball, and that’s it. Not even a mainstay, and she does nothing else. Kind of sad, really. She was done poorly.

The main focus, as you might expect, is the final episode of Bloom Ball. Rie’s in a kind of interesting predicament where she’s good at what she does, but her performance is missing something. Some spark. Vague advice like that is terrible and doesn’t really do anything, so I feel for her. The issue is that her character goes through a transformation and basically turns evil. She’s having trouble adapting.

But she manages to fix it by not really adapting at all but just turning her chunnibyo side on for the transformation, and people seem to think it fits. Again, it’s not really being a good voice actress since she’s just doing what she normally does, but at least she’ll get those very specific roles probably. Yes, I’m aware nobody has ever put that much thought into this scene. I know this information. 

And so the rest of the recording goes well, and Rie gains a lot of respect. They even take a nice picture of all the VAs and put her in the middle. To be honest, I feel like halfway through, they thought Rie was more likable and made her the main character because she’s been given probably more time than anyone else, or at least pretty close to some of the others.

I’m definitely not against that because she is one of my favorites. She has a lot more personality than most of them do and she feels a lot less flat. Haruna has almost no personality, but I think that’s because she never got a chance to have one. Just utterly shafted completely, and it is kind of sad. They might save her a bit in the final episode, it looks like, but you can’t undo 23 episodes with 1. It’s just not happening.

This series has been a bit all over the place, but I think it’s been good for the most part. Better than I expected, and that seems to be the common opinion, so I’m glad people are enjoying it. It will never be the best or even second-best show about this topic, I’m sure, but it still explored things in an interesting way that kept me thinking a lot, so I appreciate that. We’ll end it next time.

Thank you very much for reading

This is also the longest episode review series I’ve done. Neat.