Code:Breaker – 07-09

Hitomi’s true power lies in his ability to look less ‘QUALITY’ than the rest of the cast

I was doing so well with keeping up my posts weekly and then exam week hit me out of nowhere. OTL Though I guess I shouldn’t call it ‘exam week’ since I didn’t write exams so much as compile/improve my work throughout the semester and have it judged. Oh well, the important thing is that I’m now school free until sometime January. On to the 3 weeks of Code:Breaker I missed.

Episode 7:

Time is out of joint. They’re totally just mixing in story elements however they please now. However, I am glad that we had the chance to see Sakura’s yakuza based household, which explains why she’s used to punching people. I was worried that they’d leave that part out, since I thought it helped explain her character a tiny bit. I thought they might have since they showed Sakura’s house looking non-yakuza-like in earlier episodes. The other Code:Breakers seemed to mix in as well too despite not originally being there in the manga. It’s kind of amusing how the family has no questions about Sakura bringing an unconscious boy into the house or the fact that a 10 year old is drinking.

I suppose that I should be happy about Sakura doing something this episode, but really, she’s just turned into the character who acts as a device to answer all of the questions viewers might have. With all of the Code:Breakers all suddenly gathered together, she has even less of a presence than when she was kidnapped all of the time in the manga. She didn’t even preform her usual lecture on how killing is bad. Instead, she just kind of… disappeared and occasionally shouted “Oogami!” while the screen flashed to a close up of her face to remind us that she’s still relevant. But that being said, she did play a more important part. St least we actually saw more of  the reasons behind why Sakura actually has importance as a character other than to act as the foil character type with a conscience against Rei. Seeing how heavily the Code:Breakers rely on their powers, having something that works against them makes them considerably less dangerous. Without the sword, Rei would have been just a normal person like the people he burns up all the time. …A normal person who’s capable of withstanding multiple lightning strikes. Let’s extend our disbelief with that point though.

So yeah, being Lost isn’t the end of the world. Not that you would have been able to tell from the way they mentioned it and refused to tell Sakura though. There was a whole lot of unneeded suspense there for something that was just a minor inconvenience in the episode.

Episode 8:

Almost as if to make up for the absence last episode, this episode had a good portion of it dedicated to Sakura’s optimism on humanity. …Or is it. They seemed to have left the explanation to Sakura’s oppression to killing as she was traumatized as a kid. If it wasn’t for her constant talk of warmth and the heart, you could probably attribute her opposition to killing not to the fact that she thinks everyone is worth saving, but more towards to fact that she doesn’t want to see anyone else dead. Less selflessness and more selfishness. Not that Code:Breaker isn’t interesting already, but it might have been interesting as well if Sakura had taken on the former mentality. Like I stated before though, they’ve made it pretty clear that Sakura really thinks that humanity is worth saving. I wonder if they’ll go any deeper into the topic or not, seeing how they already showed that flashback of Sakura surrounded by corpses back in episode 2. I don’t think they have any real obligation to though, since the manga still hasn’t entirely gone into this yet.

We don’t even know much about Heike’s character since he was only briefly introduced, and he’s already betraying them all. What a guy. Though maybe it’s because he’s had so little screen time that they can get away with his betrayal like this. Most of the teamwork in the current Code:Breaker works out because the character’s motivations and ambitions have already been laid out and clarified. Having Heike, a fairly new and unintroduced character anime-wise, betray Eden works better here than if we already knew about him and what he wanted to do. For those not entirely sure what I’m going on about here, Heike never betrayed anyone at this point of the story, so this came out of nowhere for me. …Or at least, I don’t remember him ever even slightly betraying anyone here. They’ve changed so much here, it’s hard for me to remember how the manga went exactly.

…Prince’s shadow powers aren’t as cool looking as I thought they’d be. Hell, it’s probably the least flashy out of the Code:Breakers. I guess all of the research and development went into magnetism and sound as opposed to shadows and light. …It’s a bit disappointing since I was really looking forward to seeing what they could do here.

Episode 9:

Finally, Hitomi’s reasoning is explained and just like every other problem brought up on this show, it has moral ambiguity to it. What he’s doing is pretty noble, but the way he’s going about it obviously isn’t. Just like the evil for evil concept with Rei, Hitomi seems pretty dead set on his ways of doing things and really does believe that the ends justify the means. The Code:Breakers don’t really change over that often in the story, but judging from the clocks, there seem to have been quite a few of them. I have no idea how long Hitomi has been at this job, but losing a friend is never an easy thing. Rei might be perfectly at ease thinking himself as evil and dying eventually because of it, but Hitomi wants recognition for those who died for a noble cause. Neither seems to be willing to change his viewpoint on the matter. Who is right? …If anything, we can compliment the author, Kamijyo Akimine, for coming up with all of these morality issues.

Once again, Rei proves that he’s not quite the cold and cruel person he was shown as in the first couple episodes… maybe. Sure, he had little to no problem almost killing his subordinate, but he DID say ‘thank goodness’ when Sakura stopped the whole thing.This might be progress. Kind of. He did show relief at having to not kill her, but on the other hand, would he still extend that to a criminal? Probably not. Kanda wasn’t really evil in the first place, so even with Rei being ‘evil for evil’, he didn’t want to kill her. Every time he does something that makes him look better, there’s always some reasoning behind it. Even if he does have a 360 character change at the end of this arc, if the show ever continues past that, I’m sure that he’ll revert back to is usual self.

Sakura gets kidnapped… again. However, this time it’s completely part of her will, so that makes it slightly less pathetic. I guess my speculation about them changing her personality was for nothing since she’s maintaining her stubbornness pretty well. She might understand Rei a tiny bit more after hanging with him for so long, but in the end, she really doesn’t want anyone to die. She even believes in the prime minister (though to be fair, she hasn’t seen his manipulative side yet. …I’m not entirely sure why Hitomi would think that she would get in the way though since as far as I know, her powers work for stopping other powers and not for stopping bombs. We’ve all seen her stop Hitomi’s powers full on a couple of episodes ago as well, so who knows why he was so surprised at Sakura stopping Kanda and Rei as well. Or maybe that’s because he didn’t think she’d be able to interfere.

I never remember the manga ever going into Hitomi and Kanda’s backstory like the mini flashback seemed to be hinting at, so this should be interesting if they show more of that. Hell, I didn’t even realise that Kanda and Hitomi were that close until the more recent chapters of Code:Breaker. Or maybe it’s just me not paying that close attention to the characters in the first place in between the bomb threats and fighting.

…Uhhh, this definitely isn’t going where I remember it going. The main point are there, but they’re definitely extending this long past the amount of episodes I thought this would take. That’s okay though since everything still seems to fit story-wise. I don’t remember Hitomi’s character ever being that cool either, so there’s a plus. It’s easier to see that he’s 01 in this version since he’s taking on 5 at a time as opposed to the manga, where there were less of them. …Ignoring the fact that they kind of attacked him one at a time instead of all at once, which might have been slightly more intelligent. The animation also had it’s ups and downs. I’ve come to the conclusion that Heike’s power looks rather uninspired when compared to Toki, Yuuki and Rei’s. On the up side though, episode 9 was pretty good the entire fighting scene, so maybe they’ve been saving the budget for the big finale coming up. …I’m not sure if they can keep the arc going for another 4 episodes, but hopefully it doesn’t drop off somewhere in the middle. The pacing for this anime has been pretty decent the whole way through with only one really boring episode, so let’s see where this goes.

Oh, on a completely different note, a character song CD came out recently for Toki, Rei and Sakura. I can’t say that it’s that great, but if they’re spending money on producing something like this, chances are that they’ll spend more for more anime. I already know of a couple OVAs coming out in the future, so maybe that will cover things like the missing Haru story…? Or maybe they’ll continue on with the later arcs. Though I have a hard time believing that the OVAs will be nearly long enough to cover another arc. Hopefully they don’t just turn out into over-glorified character cameos or something.

The next episodes seems to involve angst, flashbacks and burning hands.

About Karakuri

University student and the one at Metanorn who's known for wearing glasses. Likes blood, insanity and plot twists, but also plays otome games and adores cute romance anime. It balances out... somehow.