Boogiepop and Others Episode 002 Review

If you read my previous review of episode 001 of Boogiepop and Others you know that my opinion of the series so far isn’t great. Boogiepop still continues to play with the timeline, it feels unnecessary to me. The second episode does make the story clearer. It’s still a bit convoluted to me. We are introduced to a sociopathic student that develops a relationship with flesh eating shapeshifter he calls a manticore.

We are also introduced to a another student, Kirima Nagi. She appears to be the hero of the series. Kyouko tells another classmate, Suema about this drug that Akiko gave some of the girls. It turns out that it was an elaborate plan by Masami Saotome and the manticore to create slaves. Their plan is to “conquer the world.” They enslavement plan begins to fail, as Kamikishiro comes looking for Echoes she’s killed by the manticore.

The strange man from the previous episode is called Echoes. He suppose to be an alien that can only repeat what others say, hence the name. His goal is to test humanity, to determine if humans are kind or not. However, his clone had become the “man-eater” or manticore we saw earlier. How Kamikishiro gets this information is chalked up to being “just a feeling,” or a telepathic link. With Kamikishiro dead, it looks like it’s up to Nagi to team up with Echoes.

I can say that episode 2 is superior to episode 1, but the sporadic narration is still annoying. I don’t get why they need to do it. The effect of this type of narration is that any questions created get answered during the same episode. It feels like a gimmick. The characters are still to thin to really have genuine concern for their safety, although I would admit that I felt badly for Kamikishiro. I don’t find Boogiepop to be scary at all. This episode did increase in quality, so I give it one more episode before deciding that if it’s worth my time. It’s a slow moving, confusing anime with a somewhat ridiculous story and 2 dimensional characters, I’m hoping there’s a payoff.