Ao no Exorcist – 04

So this episode showed that this show doesn’t necessarily have to rely on its action scenes. The episode in this episode was short, and instead it was much more about the character who I suspect is going to be the female love interest. Overall, this episode served its purpose quite well: we now have a love interest who already has a good backstory and has been nicely fleshed out.

And that’s the great thing about this series: it may not be anything new, but the things it does, it does really well. For a moment I was a bit afraid of the cliches taking over this series, but by now it has shown that it’s going to turn into one of the examples of how this kind of premise should be done well.

The main character is still a bit annoying, but I doubt that this will remain for long. Even this episode, which focused on a completely different character for once, had plenty of scenes that fleshed out the two brothers again.

Oh, and another plus of this series: I can actually see this working well in a 24 episode series: on one hand it has enough time to create a good cast, and at the same time its backstory is not way too ambitious: we have a pretty clear goal and path laid out by the first two episodes and the main character isn’t the type to beat around the bush as soon as he finds a way to kill Satan. It can be a good yet compact story that can both deliver on the action and wrap itself up without much problems, even if the manga does go on for longer. The creators have already showed that they know how to improve the storyline of the manga for the better (or so I’ve heard, of course).
Rating: ** (Excellent)