Shakugan no Shana III (Final) – Episode 1

I’m glad that my joke of this episode being a recap was wrong. That would have made me cry. I mean, it still had to connect this season to the end of the last one, but whatever.

Also, here’s to hoping Commie releases this fast every week. It only took them about 6 hours from airing to sub, and these aren’t even rips of official subs. Which is actually kind of surprising, considering I thought Funimation was going to simulcast this. They licensed the second season and the S OVAs a while ago but never went anywhere with them, so I thought they were waiting for this season to bring attention back to the series.

Anyways, enough of my theories. Lets talk about the actual episode.

Fuck yeah, talk about an opening! Shit was getting blown up everywhere. Well, okay, a bunch of cannons were just shooting exploding fireball things, but that’s still awesome.

Then enters our lead!

It’s kind of strange that the enemies didn’t do anything as Shana just took her time walking to them. Maybe they were as frozen in excitement about Shana coming back for the big finale as we were.

It takes her a matter of moments to kill most of them, showing that she’s had some training since we last saw her. But then shortly after we get the big reveal (and one of two spoilers I accidentally stumbled across months ago).

Yes, this mysterious figure who showed up in the trailers for the show and was pictured as the big baddie for this season is none other than our male lead, Yuuji.

He’s mysterious about his motivations for becoming an enemy, but he mentions something about changing Shana’s fate. Seems like Yuuji discovered something in his absence, eh?

Right before Shana and Yuuji start duking it out, we get a cut back to Christmas Eve, showing what actually happened in the vague ending the second season showed. The footprints had been Yuuji’s, and Shana had only looked happy because she thought Yuuji had chosen her when she saw him across the street.

After this we get the OP, which was pretty fucking awesome despite that I had been expecting a new Mami Kawada song. KOTOKO has stepped up their game, considering I usually didn’t like the songs they did for Shana.

Anyways, we then get to see Shana training a bit and talking to Yuuji’s mom. It seems like his flame went out and existence disappeared, as nobody remembers him and his favorite cup is gone. After that we got the obligatory fanservice scene of the season, which was annoying, but it’s best they get it out of the way now, I suppose.

At school, we find out that Yoshida also remembers Yuuji, but none of the other students do. This isn’t too surprising, but we also learn about what happened on Christmas Eve from Yoshida’s end. Just when she was about to leave because she thought Yuuji had chosen Shana, Shana comes running up and flies them over to Yuuji’s house, where they witness his possessions disappearing first-hand. Afterwards we see them at their homes crying over him disappearing, but when it cuts back to the school, it turns out Shana is convinced he isn’t completely gone (which, obviously, we know is correct due to the prologue’s foreshadowing).

We then cut to Yuuji talking in what looks like… himself. I suppose it’s better than floating around in space, but oh well.

Turns out he’s talking to Silver. Though Silver doesn’t really seem to be evil. All he does is ask Yuuji what he’s thinking about and answer his questions. Though he could just be being deceitful or something. With a voice as smooth as his, I wouldn’t put it past him.

After this, we see Margery nearly passed out (or is she waking up?) with alcohol on top of her. She babbles a bit about how Outlaw is being attacked by Bal Masque, and how Keisaku managed to join. She also mentions that she believes Yuuji is still around too, because he has Silver with him and such.

There’s a little confrontation with Keisaku and Eita after this, where Keisaku fully expects Eita to come back and help Margery. While Keisaku is sure of this, it seems like Eita still isn’t, though Keisaku will probably end up being right.

We also see Wilhelmina being her usual self, deep in research about all of the plot events that have happened so far. Bal Masque attacking Outlaw, mainly. She mentions how they have some grand master plan they’re working towards by doing these attacks, though what that plan is she has no idea.

Shana then shows up and Wilhelmina mentions that she should send a report directly to Outlaw about what’s happened.

When Shana goes to her room to write the report, we find out that the biggest reason she believes Yuuji is still around is because the letters she and Yoshida gave him were returned to them. Mysterious~.

We then get a nice little training sequence between Shana and Margery, with Shana learning some new uses for her flames. They actually mentioned in the first or second season that she’s just been using her sword’s power to draw out the flames within her, rather than doing so through her own power, so it looks like she’s training to fix that.

The episode ends with Yuuji telling Silver that he wants to “go back,” which is then followed by a scene showing him already leading Bal Masque and ascending to his throne.

I think there may have been a bit of a time skip from those two scenes, because that seemed awfully abrupt. Plus, the entire episode had been jumping around time-wise, so who knows what happened when.

That was a pretty damn good first episode. Mainly a bunch of teasing about things to come and setting up the scene for this final season. I bet we’ll get more details on this stuff later on, so until then we’ll just have to take our best guesses as to what’s going on and such.

---