Fate/kaleid liner Prisma☆Illya 2wei! Episode 1 [First Impression]

Impression

It’s been a surreal Wednesday. Somehow, we’ve got shows featuring hot guys and cute lolis airing almost back-to-back to each other on the same channel, and it’s certainly a strange experience to be savouring Prisma Illya once more after just having watched this week’s episode of Free. The disparity between the two is more drastic than the drop in quality between the two seasons of IS Infinite Stratos – the only similarity they share is that characters in both series are about as straight as rainbows. Except I tried to ignore it in Free, while it was absolutely glorious in Prisma Illya. We’ve reached the promised land at last! A season of wonderful yuri awaits! Ice-cream feeding scene was best scene – Miyu got all pouty when Ilya didn’t say “ahn~”, and I definitely didn’t miss how she made every effort to suck Ilya’s ice-cream stick clean. That was… surprisingly erotic. Unfortunately, the morning kiss didn’t happen, and Ilya seems to be slightly oblivious as to Miyu’s attachment to her, but since it’s been so long I’ll take what I can get. May this ship last forever more.

Other than the very odd occurrence at the very end of the episode, things were fairly uneventful – I’m taking this as a hopeful sign of increased breathing space and thus a two-cour run. And much like the Nanoha franchise, the original season (which established the friendship between the girls) apparently pales in comparison to the excitement of 2wei!, which bodes very well indeed. At the very least, I appreciated how they made more passing references to Fate/Zero with the glinting sunlight off the water under the Fuyuki Bridge as well as an appearance by the ever-cynical Waver Velvet. Although I think I would have enjoyed the dual magical girl transformation scene a bit more if Rin and Luvia weren’t perpetually arguing in the background.

As for the elephant in the room… ley line restoration at the Ryuudou Temple seems to have brought on a lot more trouble than it’s worth, along with a whole new bunch of questions and mysteries. This might just be a lapse in my memory, but I found it odd that Ilya remembered her fight against Saber as Archer Ilya – somehow she was able to enter that form immediately this episode and summon Rho Aias, though that may be because the seal holding back those powers was already broken back then. Assuming that Ilya is the vessel for the Holy Grail, and Miyu is something similar borne out of Kaleidoscope, what exactly is Kuro Ilya? I don’t think it’s anything to do with parallel worlds this time, because it’s almost like she was “created” out of thin air using the Archer card, which is now coincidentally missing. Nor is Kuro Ilya to Ilya what Archer is to Shirou, despite the fact that Kuro’s design was clearly based off Archer – if she was Ilya’s future self, that wouldn’t explain the card going missing. It’s almost like this is the card itself given a personality and human form based off of Ilya, who I suppose is providing her prana. Well, I’m sure she has lots to spare.

Given Kadowaki Mai’s heart-meltingly cute rendition of Ilya, I don’t know if Saito Chiwa is exactly suited to play Kuro Ilya, though like with Kotori in Rewrite I’ll probably get used to it. We’ll see. More importantly, Kuro doesn’t sound like she’s going to be very cooperative from the preview, so I’m envisaging some wild goose chasing in future episodes, hopefully with more yuri attached. A few third parties will be involving themselves too, so that’ll be lots of fun – Gilgamesh, Bazett and Caren, anyone?

Possibility of Blogging: Loli/10