10 Second Anime - Death Parade - Episode 3

Death Parade - Episode 3



A pairing has a friendly bowling match and finds so much more.

Heh.

Judgment in the afterlife doesn't always have to be so full of tension.

 

I think the only reason these two needed to be judged is because the young man died before showing his childhood friend what kind of reaction he would have to her plastic surgery.

 

In the OVA Death Billiards from 2013, Kurokami (I'm just going to start calling black-haired girl this because in the closing credits, she's called kuro kami no onna 黒髪の女) did all that "First! Second! Third! Fourth! Fifth!" in laying out the rules, so it's fun to see her do that for the series.

 

In that OVA, it wasn't clear whether those two people died in the same place, just that they died at the same time. In the series, the two couples we've seen so far have died in the same place and time.

 

Because the young man was woken up on a couch, we didn't see whether he came down an elevator with the demon mask over it. I'm still not sure this matters or not. But we did get confirmation that the masks show where the souls are going to end up after playing the game.

 

Kurokami did a little "you go girl" fist clench when the young woman scored her date with the man she loved.

 

Quin Decim needs to work on his joke delivery.



Hey, 5 minutes is pretty long for speed dating. Although, this is the afterlife, so what does time really mean in this space?

 

Kurokami was not amused.

 



And then she got embarrassed.

 



Maybe showing the other eye, or wiggling the visible eyebrow would help signal a change in tone for Decim here. Just a suggestion.

So, do Kurokami and Decim always have fun with the games after the couple has been sent off? I guess it's part of cleaning up the bar before the next duo shows up.

 



It looks like Kurokami is there to have as much an effect on Decim as he's there to teach her how to be an arbiter. If you can't have fun in the afterlife, when can you?

 



Hmm.

I like the confirmation that both souls can go to the same place. It doesn't have to be an either-or situation. We also confirmed that Kurokami doesn't get the two people's memories before the bar game starts. What we don't know about for sure is why it's important that Decim establish that the two players don't have memories of how they got there. I surmise that part of the challenge is having all the memories return by the last turn of whatever game they play, so that the last moment the two can strike at each other has more import.

 

In this episode's case, the couple didn't seem to care about the game being played for each other's lives. I figure that it was mainly because they were already pretty happy people and were not so desperate to accomplish some selfish goal. Like Kurokami said, sometimes it's nice just to have a friendly atmosphere.

 

Next time, it looks like we're back to tension and drama. An older couple should know exactly which buttons to press to piss off the other one. How fitting that their competition is going to be a button mashing arcade game. As long as we see more of this afterlife and the people who work in it, I'll be happy to see where this show is going.