I ended up mainlining almost the whole thing in one go. I watched the first episode Friday; then I was watching some anime this evening and decided I'd just keep watching this series until I was tired of it, or I ran out of it, whichever came first.
I ran out.
It's damn good stuff. The basic story begins with a girl who's perhaps 12 going to a robotics exposition with her 8-year-old brother; and while they're out they stop at a mall to buy a birthday present for their mother.
He says he has to go to the bathroom and she asks him to get her something to drink when he's done; and while she's waiting outside for him, the earthquake strikes.
...I'm not saying anything else about how the series progresses. I'm only going to say that they pulled a major league fast one on me; after I realized what they'd done I couldn't even be angry, because it had all been perfectly executed. There wasn't anything that was pulled out of an anatomically unlikely orofice; it had all been foreshadowed and laid out and all the evidence was there for anyone to see--I had just missed it.
It never fails to impress me when someone manages to play by the rules yet fool me so thoroughly. They did such an excellent job at it, I dismissed one obvious piece of foreshadowing as a continuity error.
The depiction of Tokyo, post magnitude 8.0 earthquake, looked pretty realistic to me. If I have any quarrel with the story whatsoever, it's how cavalier everyone was about entering buildings in the wake of such an earthquake. I lost track of how many times I said to the TV, "Okay, get out of the building now." Jesus.
Now that I know the whole story I'm tempted to go back and watch it again to look for the clues I know are there; but that'd be a bit much. I'll be dumping this one to DVD; I'll have a look for them when I do that.
* * *
Worst hissatsu-waza ever. "Female Ninja magic: Vagina Bubbles from Hell!"
...
The entire point behind a hissatsu-waza is that your opponent shouldn't have time to kill you. (Even if your "final attack" can continue post mortem it's not supposed to be your "final attack" in that sense.)
I'm also trying to figure out WTF the attack does, exactly. Are the Vagina Bubbles from Hell poisonous or something?
Maybe it's better not to think too much about this.