This is it folks, the end of Pastel Memories.
Our journey has come to an end with episode 12.
I actually went into this having completely forgotten that we were in the middle of the whole Evangelion “arc” or whatever you’d like to call it. Many aspects of this episode were very uncharacteristic of the anime. A little too late unfortunately, but even then it wasn’t enough to really redeem the series.
I’ll give them credit for trying to create a good ending though.
Finale
The ending was straightforward, as you’d expect from this series.
In this final episode, the girls built a bunch of robots to fight the mother virus, proceeded to get beat up, and then Maya & some other girls from episode 11 show up in a stronger robot and together the robots pin the mother virus down long enough for the girls to use the memories of otaku culture (I feel like this is a concept they never brought up until they used it here) to power up their weapons and defeat the mother virus.
Afterwards, we see that their Akibahara is still bland, but they show signs of people becoming interested in otaku stuff again. The series ends with the cafe getting a customer. So it was a soft ending, as we never learn anything really about Maya, and the overall problem wasn’t solved. I should have known this series couldn’t handle actually wrapping everything up.
I would watch a sequel, but only because of the sunk cost fallacy as I’ve made it this far with the anime, might as well go all the way. So hopefully that doesn’t happen, even though the ending is open enough to accommodate a sequel.
Change of Pace
I’d mentioned many, many times that it’d be nice if the anime drew out a problem across multiple episodes instead of just quickly introducing a problem and solving it right away. All of the worlds the girls visited felt very rushed, and ended the mother virus always dying almost instantly. Overall it was just a weak formula, because the anime had no time to actually develop anything or do anything different.
So it’s nice to see that at least the final episode carried over from episode 11. Thanks to this we got to see a few more things take place in the Evangelion world. The girls had time to actually explore the world a bit, and they had time to actually lose to the mother virus. Up until now the mother virus has always been a total joke, because by the time we’d see it, the episode would be almost over and so the girls would just destroy it immediately. For once the girls actually lost to the mother virus several times, picking themselves back up to keep fighting.
While the fight still wasn’t anything special compared to almost every other anime out there, it was a step up from the usual Pastel Memories combat we see.
Cafe
It’s sad that the slice of life / cafe scenes in Pastel Memories have become my favourite, because they clearly weren’t the focus of the anime. I just find it more enjoyable to watch the cafe because of how ridiculous it is to have so many girls working in a cafe with no customers. Even if it did have customers, there are still too many girls working at any given time apparently. It just doesn’t make sense to have more waitresses than actual chairs, as the cafe isn’t advertised as a harem cafe.
It should be though.
Anyways, we didn’t get anything really in terms of the cafe this episode unfortunately. I would have liked for majority of the episode to just be the girls slacking off as usual in various ways. Oh well, the consolation is that the series is over.
I’ll write my final thoughts on the overall series in one final Pastel Memories post.
Until then, this is about all I have to say about the final episode.
Until next time,
Thanks for reading!
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