It’s episode 15 of Shion no Ō. It’s time for Shion and Shinji’s match, so who is going to win this father-daughter matchup. Also, Satoru continues his general creepiness, but also shows how he’s been able to win in the tournament so far.
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Go Straight to the Screenshots | Go Straight to the Review
The highlights of this episode:
- Shinji wonders how Shion will play her game as he makes the first move, but is surprised by Shion’s intensity right off the bat. However, Shion starts settling into her usual game, making her moves predictable to Shinji, causing him to tap his good luck fanin a little anger, causing Shion to realize what she’s doing.
- During the match, Shinji recalls back to his first game with Shion when she was 4 years old, where he was able to beat her using only his king and thinking that she may one day be a great shogi player.
- Shinji starts running out of time and has to make his moves faster, causing him to not be able to read the game as well as he’d like, and Shion takes advantage by moving fast herself to deprive Shinji of any more time to see the game.
- Satoru shows up in the viewing room as Furuta and Saori remark how it’d be nearly impossible to read the game quickly enough. However, Satoru scoffs and starts blindly rallying off a series of moves until the end of the match in no time, amazing Furuta and Saori. Satoru also notes that Shion has a weakness: when someone makes a move she doesn’t understand, she’ll sit and try to figure out why the other player made the move and forget about the larger game.
- Shinji comes back and thinks he can get Shion into check, but Shion keeps attacking like her king isn’t in imminent danger. This causes Shinji to play the wrong move, and he ends up losing. In reality, Shinji already had Shion in check and hadn’t noticed.
- After the game, Satoru runs into Shinji outside of the association and remarks how Shinji was “the frog that was eaten by the snake he himself had raised,” but Shinji remarks that he the “father frog” was very happy to be “eaten” if it meant helping Shion. This causes Satoru to have a flashback to a memory of his father getting hit by a can in order to save him. This also seems to make Satoru realize something…
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Well, if you’ve liked the past all-shogi episodes before, you’ll like this episode as pretty much the entire episode is the match between Shion and Shinji. However, there are a couple things that I took note of that may come back later.
First, in one of Shinji’s flashbacks, his wife, Sachiko, laments the fact that Shinji wanted children and, apparently, she wasn’t able to provide. I’m wondering why we’re seeing that NOW. And it also provides someone the first real motive to do something to Shion’s parents, in theory. I’ve also wondered if Sachiko know Satoru and/or Hani-meijin more than she lets on. I’ll keep my eye on that.
Second, at the end of the episode, Satoru actually has a humanizing moment there where he seems to come to peace about his father dying (or that’s my guess) after talking to Shinji. Perhaps this will end his harassment of Shion about them not being a “real” family. I’m interested to see if that really goes somewhere from now on.
Other than that, Shion won, which is what I expected, though I think the way she did was interesting - basically playing the clock and holding out long enough so to force Shinji to have to make moves in 1 minute and then just using her ability to read the game faster to beat him.
