As an Amazon Associate, Natively earns from qualifying purchases through any Amazon links on the site.
All of our Movie & TV metadata comes from the wonderful project,
The Movie Database. Thank you! While we are permitted to use the TMDB API, we have not been endorsed or certified by TMDB.
Excellent first half, mind-numingly boring second half
The quality in this one shot down really far. The first half had a great mix of fun video game time, trivia, and slice of life moments, and while it still wasn't as good as the first volume for me, it was very solid.
Then the 2nd half kicked in, where they were on a wild goose chase for the origin of a specific type of rare bootleg version of ココロン, which afaict referred to a totally fictional character, and saw them going to Taiwan to meet an old shopkeeper who spoke Japanese, and had sold the cartridge, and was childhood friends with the owner of the game.. That section got really redundant and dragged out, and I really can't see what the point of any of it was. On top of that, it morphed into a writing pattern I hate: brilliant detective character has impossible background knowledge and deduction skills that the audience and other characters are not privy to - and just pulls the solution out of thin air, while retroactively explaining how they thought of it. Went way past suspension of disbelief for me.
The thing that makes the first two volumes work well in my opinion, is that the crazy deep dive knowledge and takes that Eiko holds are things that the audience could actually potentially know and find out. That's fun - b/c you get to participate in the mystery and test your own knowledge, while also learning cool facts you could share with other people. If this volume had stuck to that approach, or shortened this story to 2 chapters instead of 3, I would have appreciated it more.
The series did finish with a cute final chapter between Eiko & Yoshiko at least - so that was nice :)