Pastel Memories – Episode 5 Review

One of these episodes I’m going to know the manga / anime reference!
Just not this one, again.

Three different girls (at this point I don’t know any of their names – I just watched the episode and still don’t remember a single name) went into a world about a guy who teaches an elementary school girl shogi. Seems like a pretty boring premise, and a little questionable, just like the last world they went into. But who am I to judge? I’m still watching Pastel Memories on a weekly basis after all.

I’m sure the anime will get better with time..

Super Short Synopsis

Three different girls go into an anime world, join forces with an elementary school girl, and proceed to watch the girl play shogi & other games with viruses until the world is saved.

Shogi

If there is one takeaway from this episode, it was that I never realized there were so many types of shogi! Does shogi just mean “game” or something? How come chess doesn’t have so many different iterations? Or maybe it does, and I just had no idea.

So I’ve just looked it up, and it turns out there ARE different ways to play chess!

Going to copy some of them over, courtesy of Wikipedia:

• Chess960 (or Fischer Random Chess): The placement of the pieces on the first rank is randomised, with the opponent’s pieces mirroring it. Invented by Bobby Fischer (1996).
• Pre-chess: Proposed by Pal Benko in 1978. The game starts with white and black pawns set as usual, but the initial position of other pieces is selected by the players. White first places one of his pieces on his first rank, and then Black does the same. Players continue to alternate in this manner until all pieces have been placed, with the only restriction being that bishops must be on opposite-colour squares. The game then proceeds in the usual way.
• Charge of the Light Brigade: Apart from the usual king and pawns, one side has three queens and the other has seven knights.
• Dunsany’s Chess (and the similar Horde chess): One side has standard chess pieces, and the other side has 32 pawns (or 36 in the case of Horde chess).
• Circular chess: Played on a circular board consisting of four rings, each of sixteen squares.
• Double Chess: Two full armies per side on a 12×16 board, the first to mate an enemy king wins. Pawns advance up to four steps on their first move. Capablanca found the game “remarkably interesting”. Invented by Julian Hayward (1916).
• Absorption chess (also called cannibal chess, power absorption chess, or seizer’s chess): Pieces gain the abilities of the pieces they capture.
• Alice Chess: Played with two boards: a piece moved on one board passes “through the looking glass” onto the other board. By V. R. Parton (1953).
• Anti-King chess: Features an anti-king. This piece is in check when not attacked. If a player’s anti-king is in check and unable to move to a square attacked by the opponent, the player loses (checkmate). The anti-king cannot capture enemy men, but can capture friendly men. A king may not attack the opponent’s anti-king. The anti-king may not check its own king. Other rules the same as in standard chess, including check and checkmate to the regular king. By Peter Aronson (2002).

And many, many more.
Seriously, there must be at least a hundred different chess variants on this Wikipedia page! I bet you all regret not joining chess club now right?

Circular chess and anti-king chess sound very interesting.
Anyone ever play a chess variant like any of these?

Back to the Anime

Shogi / chess aside, how was the episode?
Well, I’ve learned a lot about different chess iterations, indirectly thanks to the episode.

I’d say that episode 5 was about just as good as episode 4. Maybe slightly better, if only so I can continue to say that the anime is slowly getting better on an episodic basis. I spent a decent amount of time reading up on different chess variations, so this whole experience was worth it in my books.  It’s nice to see that there are different ways to battle the virus in this anime, as we’ve seen with episodes 4 and 5.

I’ve completely given up on trying to learn names. There are just too many!

Also, I wish the anime would get a little more creative with introducing the next infected world. Each episode so far has been the same: girls slacking off on the job, a manga gets brought up, and then it gets infected right after. How about a little mystery to this? Like something happens in the real world, and then the girls have to try and narrow down the applicable manga until they figure out which is infected? Or maybe someone actually visits the cafe and mentions something that hints at an infected manga?

What a cake job these girls have too! They get to just hang out with their friends in a cafe, serving themselves coffee and whatnot while sitting around reading manga or playing games. I wonder if we will ever meet the owner. Maybe they aren’t even getting paid? Could this be a voluntary position that the girls all accepted?

That’s it for my review of episode 5 of Pastel Memories.
Now I just need to find someone to play some interesting chess variants with!

Until next time,
Thanks for reading.

---

Other Pastel Memories Posts

• Episode 1
• Episode 2
• Episode 3
• Episode 4
• Episode 5
• Episode 6
• Episode 7
• Episode 8
• Episode 9
• Episode 10
• Episode 11
• Episode 12
• Series Review