10 Second Anime - Shokugeki no Soma S2 - Episode 13 [END]

The pre-open after party at Shino's includes some familiar faces who want to try Souma's dish. Season Finale.

Episode 13 - "Pomp and Circumstance"

Heh.

I think the animators have learned that if you want to make any Shokugeki episode better, just add Hinako.

Aw. Shinomiya really is an old softie. Look at his old friends he invited for the after party.

He even invited his mom.

Souma asked Shinomiya why he went into French cuisine, which made him think back to how happy his mom was that they went to a local French restaurant to celebrate his enrollment in elementary school. There was no way in hell he was going to tell Souma that, though!

The closing event for the night was the competition between the kitchen staff to place a new meal on the menu. Wei had an interesting back story in that she was the original butcher before Lucie and she became the service manager so she could talk to customers to widen her ideas about cooking.

Before we talk about what Souma did for his dish, let's just appreciate the comedy greatness of Hinako.

Supposedly, it was supposed to be a big secret about the shokugeki between Souma and Shinomiya. That's why Doujima called it a "street fight" and why Chef Chapelle doesn't know anything about it.

It looks like Lucie fits the Hinako character in Shinomiya's kitchen.

As for Souma's dish, it was a slight misunderstanding that he needed to win the recipe contest to graduate as a stagiaire. The other criterion for the program was fusion: taking all the skills developed from cooking in different genres to make a chef's own cooking.

Shinomiya's example was the Magician of Legumes. He had taken all his skills as a French chef to apply that flavor to fleshy root plants from all over the world.

Souma's fusion looked nothing like a magical girl transformation. It was the birth of a monster!

He finally figured out what his dad had done at Yukihira's Diner and how he had taken the world's cooking and applied it to diner food.

Souma decided to go the other way. Take Japanese diner food and apply it to the world's cooking. This is how a French version of a rice bowl can be turned into risotto stuffed quail with poached egg. Jeebus, that's inspired!

Unfortunately, like this whole season, the episode was too short. It had to deal with the other kids' stagiaire stories with a quick montage.

I have no idea what was going on, but it looked liked all the kids passed.

Geh.

I haven't been paying attention to the opening credits lately, but for this episode, they included Shinomiya and his crew. This meant some of the credit scrawl was placed in different areas, which meant we have glorious Erina without distracting letters in front of her.

Some of the other girls lost their credit scrawls too.

Remember how I said Hinako makes every episode better? She's not just spice for comedy. She's also spicy hot!

Shinomiya's clothes got ripped apart tasting Souma's dish, but let's concentrate on Hinako who barged into taste testing the recipe contest.

She enjoyed herself. I enjoyed watching her enjoy herself...

It might be a while before we see animated foodgasms again. I'm glad the last one was with Hinako.

Final Thoughts.

It was quite apparent that the adaptation for this season was mightily compressed. We fit in the three final rounds of the Autumn Elections into about 8 and a half episodes and then did the Stagiaire arc of all the kids in one final go. If this show was slated for 24 to 26 episodes, we would have had time to understand what was going on the montage at the end. They looked thrown in to satisfy the fans of the manga. It made sense to follow Souma's story if we were only going to have one cour, but even his story felt pressed for time.

Overall, I was a bit disappointed with how the season played out. The animation quality never dropped, but long panning still shots and recycled animation sequences were used instead, which told me that the hurried pace of the adaptation concentrated on getting in as many words of dialog as possible to explain what was happening instead of animating it.

The pace also meant that the emotional impact of the twists and dramatic revelations of the cooking techniques was muted. Sure, the musical score was the same as the first season, so it was almost muscle memory to feel the rush of an emotional moment, but most of that feeling was just an echo.

Really, this whole season felt like an echo of the first installment. Recognizable, but muted and flat. Still, it was nice to see the kids again, and I was glad we got some sexy foodgasms from new people like Sonoka and Alice's mom Leonora. Thankfully, they spent what time they could on the details of Souma's story, but this choice still muted his impact in relation to his opponents.

Oh well. It was rushed and recognizably Shokugeki no Soma, but it ultimately suffered from its time compressed adaptation.