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Milky Holmes TD is what you call a "step in the right direction". Unfortunately, the season that preceded it was three steps in the wrong direction. Sure, we're back to a full-episode format instead of just 12 minutes, but TD still didn't entirely succeed in fixing the shift in style caused by Futari Wa. The shortcomings of the latter don't go completely unaddressed, but aren't really amended as much as they could've been.

Looking back, what was it that about Futari Wa that caused the entire franchise to gravitate away from its major charm points? The new heroines- The Feathers- being boring, the old heroines- ... the Milky Holmes- becoming boring as collateral damage, and the production staff- presumably a bunch of drunk Japanese businessmen- did not seem very drunk at all. Futari Wa had precisely zero of the high-tension & impact comedy that's the key appeal to this franchise and instead went for a more "serious" route. The results of that approach were very surprising to "literally nobody ever".

But lo and behold, Milky Holmes TD threw The Feathers out of the limelight and placed the Milky Holmes back as the main leads. Callooh! Callay! Moreover, extended studies performed by experts such as myself in laboratories such as my parents' basement had already deduced that the entertainment factor of a Milky Holmes series is directly proportional to the uselessness of the titular detectives. In the first and second seasons, the four girls' deduction and crime-solving skills were based less on the likes of Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe and more on the likes of "grasshoppers" and "dead goldfish". They were oafs, but they were adorable oafs. They need to be oafs. That's what they're good at. And in TD, this is for the most part intact. They have their Toys back and are regarded as professional detectives, but their actions still have that aura of lunacy around them and I wouldn't trust them to carry my shopping bags from one aisle to another. To add on to this, even the few appearances The Feathers make are a significant step up from their debut. Why, if this was their first appearance I'd even be rooting for a spin-off series starring them. Haha… hah. Hm.

Well, so far so good. Milky a go-go, right?

Now, the plot (there is one, for better or for worse) is that the Milkies are hired to help an… idol? Yeah, this season's about idols. Roll with it; the Milkies' voice actresses are essentially an idol unit anyway. The problem here, though, is that the particular idol the Milkies are in charge of helping makes The Feathers look like Mr. fucking Bean. This sentient black hole hellbent on sucking any traces of fun surrounding it answers to the name "Marine".
Marine is a super-popular idol who specializes in mediocrity. One day, during one of her concerts, the troll dolls who supply Marine with the gift of "BEING ABLE TO SING" get stolen and scattered, building up a "villain of the week" routine where the loveable Milkies and the lov… and Marine corner some shady character, and compete against them in a Stand user-esque confrontation. The weekly troll doll is then retrieved; rinse and repeat for 12 episodes. As you might have guessed, this is the season's key appeal and the source of most of the gags. Framing the actually decently amusing (if not constricted) individual hijinks the group gets into in search of troll dolls is the main plot, which revolves primarily around Marine's relationships and her past.

Evidently, one of the head honchos among the drunk businessmen in charge of the franchise was vehemently against the idea that TD would be completely stripped down of half-baked attempts at a serious plotline (I'd pin this blame on Hiroshi Nishikiori, the new director of Milky Holmes as of Futari Wa and TD, but I'd much rather keep imagining nameless drunk businessmen). Paradoxically, the franchise he's working on is one in which a guy once tried to take over the world with the power of lard, meaning there's only so much you can do to make the audience take it seriously. This fact, however, did little to stop our brave alcoholic trooper. Almost every single appearance in which newcomer Marine appears includes an inexplicable attempt to dampen the otherwise upbeat tempo of the episodes. Ever heard of a "comic relief"? Well, Marine is a tragic relief. Her interactions with the characters around her, particularly the main four, are stunningly out of place. In fact, the only characters with whom Marine has a chemistry that seems remotely natural are other newcomers to TD, such as her fellow idols. This raises several important questions: why? What's the point of including these characters to begin with? To what end was this attempt at a musical drama created? Are the Milky Holmes really not entertaining enough on their own? If idols fans are really that much of a necessary niche to appease, couldn't they have at least chosen to make the Milky Holmes idols? Shit, they're the ones who sing the majority of the insert songs. I'd go as far as to say that the songs performed by the fantastic four are better than the ones by Marine (Emi Nitta). So are the performances by Kokoro (Yoshino Nanjo). This is quite a meaningful compliment, too, since I consider the soundtrack to overall be one of the strongest parts of the season. All things considered, then, what is the point in Marine being a character at all?

Unfortunately, there's yet even another characterization problem- this one with the Milky Holmes themselves. Sure, they're relatively incompetent oafs, and as previously established, this is a good thing. On the other hand, it's… forced. This mostly takes form in the lack of personality differences between the four: in seasons 1 & 2, they were all insane doofs, but each had her own special way of expressing that, whereas in TD (and Futari Wa, and Alternative), all four are essentially the same character in a different color scheme and with a different tone of voice. The studio had the basic understanding of what is needed to make the Milky Holmes likeable (read: what made the first two seasons as good as they were), but did not go the extra mile to implement anything BEYOND the absolute basics.

The individual "monster-of-the-week" confrontations are moderately entertaining, a lot of the running gags of the franchise are acknowledged, and Kokoro exists and is exactly what you would expect her to be (which is important, because Kokoro is the safety net in case the Milky Holmes aren't being funny enough). And yet, TD was still not a worthwhile (belated) successor to Dai 2 Maku. What would it have taken? Removing Marine and her cohorts from the plot, or otherwise replacing them with a cast more appropriate for Milky Holmes? That would've been a start, but then, other characters need retooling as well, as does the direction of the comedy in itself. The comedy being there at all is an absolutely welcome change from Futari Wa, but a lot more needs to be done. Rather, a lot LESS needs to be done, and the tried-and-true formula of the earlier seasons should really be given another shot- yes, even at the expense of variety.

Will Milky Holmes even continue on to a fifth season? Who knows? It's soul-crushing to admit, but honestly, I'm not very confident about having this franchise fulfill my cravings for a wild, zany comedy about four girls with a pink-haired lead voiced by Suzuko Mimori anymore.

….oh, Teekyuu's getting a fifth season…

Naming an anime "Corpse Party: Tortured Souls" is like making a promise to the viewer that you're going to deliver with exactly that. It's easy enough to expect the opposite; after all, for some reason a lot of would-be horrifying, gory anime are hit with the unfortunate black bars of censorship, or the convenient off-screen carnage of PG-13 justice, or otherwise just have a mechanism to protect your eyes from seeing violence, even if violence is the reason you're there. Sometimes the Blu-ray edition arrives months later to fix that, and sometimes it just remained unfixed, forever covered in a shining white light across the ... screen where entrails should've been visible. In the case of "Corpse Party: Tortured Souls", the title alone brazenly declares that it has torture, corpses, spirits of the dead, and raves. It's practically OBLIGATED to be a gruesome splatterfest, PG-13 be damned.

At first glance, though, it might seem like the odds are against that. There are primarily three sorts of people who would watch this anime: unassuming strangers who want to see high school students get abused by ghosts, unassuming strangers who are squeamish to blood and don't yet know that this anime will feature high school students getting abused by ghosts, and fans of the video game it adapts who want to see their favorite high school students get abused by ghosts, this time animated. However, said source material, Corpse Party (...Blood Covered: Repeated Fear) is a handheld video game that's developed by a rather small studio. So visually, what it can show is inherently limited to pixelated guts and the occasional artist CG. To amend this, the game mainly relies on its excellent audio and writing to convey its horrors. In many ways, reading a lengthy description of a torture scene, alongside the horrifyingly realistic screams of the talented voice cast, is a lot more effective than flatly 'showing' what takes place. To add to that, "Tortured Souls" is actually the second OVA based on the franchise, the first one, "Missing Footage", being more of a trailer. Despite being an OVA and therefore being more immune to censorship than television broadcast series, Missing Footage ended up being censored all the same.

So, taking into account the style of horror displayed in the source material, which is unsuitable to be imitated properly in an animated adaptation, and Missing Footage being an unfortunate display of censorship, there should be no reason to assume Tortured Souls will fully live up to its title. There shouldn't be, and yet, well...

...Corpse Party: Tortured Souls ended up being, quite simply, a slasher film in animated format.

Does it live up to its title? It damn well surpasses the title, as it's not called "Corpse Party: Tortured Souls: Eyeballs Being Skewered by Goddamn Scissors: Now With 50% Less Innards". Basically, they did not hold back. The very concept of "holding back" was brutalized as much as the show's main cast. The result is nothing short of a 2 hour guro display of high school students being violently executed, fitting squarely into the genre of "Slicing of Lives". No censorship whatsoever; no hopes or dreams, either.

Without a doubt, the brutality and even the plot-induced psychological despair deserve some respect for how unadulterated they are. Of course, like quite a few other Japanese horrors, it relies on vaguely sexual gore and excessive violence more so than the "don't look behind your back!" sort of subtle scares (or God forbid jump scares), accomplishing a result that's more 'disturbing' than 'scary', but it executes the former absolutely splendidly while still retaining aspects of the latter. And yet unfortunately, there's still something besides that to be desired, something that's perhaps only noticeable while having the source material as a point of comparison. The more 'refined' elements, the ones that aren't judged by the amount of spleens visible to the naked eye; that is, the characters themselves, and to a lesser extent the plot in general.

Alongside its more subtle direction of horror, the main protagonists in the video game were more than just slaughter material for the villains. In classic utsuge fashion, all the characters that end up dying horribly are to varying degrees likable, given background, motivations, something to make you care for them. Unsurprisingly, though, Tortured Souls ended up suffering from the bane of many, many video-game-to-anime adaptations: time constraints. Jamming lengthy stories into 12 episodes- or in this case, only 4. The characters have been reduced to the absolute basics of what their personalities should consist of. However, unlike most cases, there was a way to make the best out of this predicament, and that was intentionally shifting the focus from the characters to the beheading thereof. It took a more "western" approach to horror, one that doesn't try to make the viewer particularly empathic or attached to the characters, essentially amplifying the raw horror and gore aspects at the cost of the emotional and heartbreaking ones. To this end, the characters were more than just "reduced to their basics", and some of them were altered to act in a stranger way as part of the process of shocking the audience- for instance, altering one of the characters' deaths from a suicide to an armed fit of madness, in the process getting quickly killed by another character.

On the storyline front, the premise is as simple as always. A bunch of teenagers and a teacher accidentally perform a ritual that transports them to the cursed Heavenly Ho- I mean, Tenjin Elementary School, in which dying means experience the pain of your death for all eternity as a soul (a 'tortured soul', if you will). While the plot unsurprisingly progresses a lot quicker than usual and several minor and major plot points are different, none of this is exactly noticeable without being familiar with the source material- which begs the question, does it really matter? All things considered, the result in question is by no means bad. Shallow, arguably, and perhaps even disappointing in some aspects. But 'bad' would be far too much of a stretch. Looking at the production values, most everything is pretty good- sure enough, the animation for most 'normal' scenes isn't the best Studio Asread has produced, especially considering that this is an OVA and not a television broadcast, but the, uh, 'raunchier' scenes are done well and are pleasing to the eyes. In as much as decapitation is capable of being "pleasing to the eyes".

And as the "Party" in the title promises, the soundtrack is great, albeit primarily recycled from the game. The voice cast is terrific, featuring good ol' Pikachu as the main antagonist, and A Certain strangely familiar scientific pairing among the main protagonists. The opening song performed by resident cast member Asami Imai is likewise superb, and the cast's performances are enough to make all the gory scenes disturbing even with the screen turned off. All in all, the audio is very splendidly done.

And so, the main drawback lies with the characters. Even while being a stranger to the franchise, it's easy enough to see that neither the protagonists nor the antagonists are particularly deeply thought out, to the point where it's hard to see them as being a lot more than a hunter and its prey, both serving as the 'trigger' for the violence to occur. But had I been a stranger to the franchise, I would've by no means expected anything really beyond that from something titled "Corpse Party". Considering this and the dramatically different ending, the best way to enjoy Tortured Souls would be to treat it as a standalone creation. This way, Corpse Party: Tortured Souls is a very welcome addition to horror anime, and makes for a great anti-censorship statement, and an example to be followed.


On the other hand, if you find the notion of panty shots flashing directly before the violent mutilation of a schoolgirl to be disagreeable, consider not watching Corpse Party: Tortured Souls, as Corpse Party: Tortured Souls is very, very disagreeable.

As a rule of thumb, the longer a media franchise remains active, the more likely it is to gravitate away from its original charm points. Granted, change or experiments are never necessarily a bad thing, but in the case of Milky Homes, they've overstayed their welcome shortly after they arrived.

Anyone acquainted with Tantei Opera Milky Holmes- or, hell, anyone who so much as saw images of it- knows that it's not particularly melodramatic or deep. It's quirky, zany, wild, and arguably shallow; but I, for one, wouldn't have it any other way. The first season's comedic direction successfully produced hilarious results, later to be improved ... to downright masterful levels in the the second season, Dai 2 Maku. By all means, it was the franchise's prime, but almost inevitably, such levels of quality were not here to stay. There wasn't much to worry about the the time; Milky Homles - Alternative were two short specials that, while not executed very well, were still welcome additions to the franchise, presenting a "what if" scenario that would've presumably later lead to a third season that's back to what Milky Holmes is really about.

Alas...

"The Age of Detectives. The two flowers, vying for beauty. Their names are the Detective and the Phantom Thief"... if nothing else, this basic setting was retained in Futari wa Milky Holmes, the third season in the franchise, and a canon semi-direct continuation to the second season. As far as the story's concerned, it doesn't exactly connect with the final events of the previous season, but continuity was never really Milky Holmes' strong forte; or rather, it was never all that crucial to proper enjoyment of the show.

Futari, as its name suggests, stars two spunky aspiring Detective lolis. The story revolves around them solving crime (which is apparently detective slang for "physical violence" in this show) under a secret identity, incurring the wrath of the local Phantom Thief group, as well as a certain drill-haired police detective. In a way, the existence of new protagonists was the show's initial warning signal, signifying that this might not have been the classic Milky Holmes coveted by its fans. "Where are the Milky Homles?" "Where is G4?" "Who are Arsene's breasts?". Such questions may arise. As previously mentioned, though, change is never necessarily a bad thing. Some modifications of the cast are not nearly enough to bring a show to ruins, much less a franchise... and thankfully, every relevant character from the previous seasons appears in one way or another, but that's a story for another paragraph. For now, let's focus on our protagonists.

Kazumi and Alice, together known as "The Feathers", nab the spotlight.

Kazumi has a four-leaf clover hairpin, and Alice wears a nifty hat. In fact, when in their Detective outfits, they BOTH wear pretty nifty hats.

The above description was the absolute most I could do to make them sound interesting.

In a comedy setting, they would be bland. In a "serious" setting (which is what Futari is- or rather, strives to be), they would still be bland. Their personalities are mundane. Their attempted character development is miniscule and in the long run meaningless. Their Toys allow for relatively little variety in the combat scenes. They were presumably written to be "serious" replacements to the Milky Holmes, much like Alternative's Milky Holmes were "serious" replacements to the previous seasons' Milky Holmes. As a side note, seasons 1-2 and even a certain episode of Futari (and the original PSP game, worth noting) proved that it's possible for the Milky Holmes to be competent, powerful leads while still retaining their quirkiness and charm, but it's rarely taken to its full advantage. Instead, we get either Alternative's butchered Milky Holmes who are essentially glorified henchmen for Opera Kobayashi, or The Feathers, who can easily be mistaken for minor one-off characters at best, and cardboard cutouts at worst. That's not to say Futari is without its merits, but a decent chunk of its flaws can be pinned on The Feathers. That said, I gotta give credit where credit is due: the chemistry between the two is for the most part not half bad, as are the conflicts they have between themselves.

The resident rogues gallery, Color the Phantom (or "Colored Phantoms", which makes a lot more sense as a name, but that's precisely why I'll stick to the former), is thankfully less banal. Once again, they're not as memorable as the Phantom Thieves Empire, but at this point, that's to be expected. Their designs, however, actually invoke a gentleman thief aura, and their members are diverse and not as predictable as they may initially seem. It would not be an exaggeration to say that they carry the entire plot on their shoulders, for better or for worse. They interact splendidly with The Feathers, and while they're not the best villains in the franchise by a landslide, they're the ones most suited to be The Feathers' rivals... take that as you will. Furthermore, much against all expectations, the story improves tremendously with the introduction of a third party, Visconte. The boundaries between good and evil are blurred, resulting in a more interesting Detective vs. Phantom Thief conflict than the series initially seemed to offer. As far as the lead cast is concerned, the series' strength is with its antagonists. Yet whenever returning characters from previous seasons appear, they serve as a quick snap to the reality that you're watching a show where borderline extras are more interesting characters than the primary protagonists and antagonists, or so they should be, if the previous seasons are an indication.

Apparently, they aren't. To briefly talk about them, the Milky Holmes take on a mentor role in Futari, and each scene with them is marvelously ripe with attempts to make them appear to be the same clumsy bunch that were previously in the spotlight. Their defining character traits are virtually removed, to the point where they can easily be fused into one character under the archetype of "clumsy Detective mentor girl" and no one would be any the wiser, nor would their presence in the story be different at all. Kokoro, the grumpy and cocky policewoman, is now reduced to merely "the grumpy policewoman". Her mischievously arrogant nature is mostly gone, and in its place, her shtick becomes being moody at anything and everything for little reason. The rest of the G4 are all but absent, save for a handful of scenes. The Phantom Thief Empire's appearances are rather unnecessary- it at times appears as if they were shoved in at the last moment to solidify Futari's connection with the rest of the seasons. None of the recurring characters have any notable bearing on the plot, but with the Phantom Thief Empire, merely their presence as minor characters feels depressingly pointless.

The animation quality and art direction is mostly you'd expect. Nothing jaw-dropping, but definitely solid. Futari actually improves upon its predecessors in that regard, although not by much; the animation rarely falls behind, and the character's facial features (and to a lesser extent their outfits) are overall done better than ever. The voice acting also manages to be solid despite being somewhat amateurish, and the soundtrack is improved overall, with the exception of the barely subpar opening and ending songs. Basically, the production quality is mostly either identical or improved (the episodes themselves are about 10 minutes long, which would normally imply rushed pacing, but this is surprisingly not the case- there are no pacing problems despite the running time constraints), so as expected, what brings it down is the attempt to make Milky Holmes' basic setting work in an excessively serious story. Is it a bad show, though? I wouldn't go that far. As a standalone show unrelated to previous Milky Holmes entries (which nullifies the disappointment factor), it is, in one word, average. Not great, but during its airing time, made for a cute 10-minute distraction.

It should be noted, though, that perhaps the most baffling part about this series' attempt at melodrama and action is how the previous seasons themselves already had some semi-dramatic story branches, and even many impressively well done action scenes. The two aspects which Futari tries its best to succeed in, but to little avail. This is because unlike its predecessors, Futari disregarded any whimsical and over-the-top themes and took itself too seriously for its own good, when Alternative had already proved that it simply wasn't meant to be. The setting of Yokohama definitely allows for stories that are more than just whacky lolis like the Milky Holmes doing funny things, but for it to work successfully, it needs to be approached with the proper mindset; one that's aware of how the Milky Holmes universe is insane enough to gave birth to a character capable of using his erect nipples as swords, and takes advantage of that insanity.