Shinrei Tantei Yakumo: Finally, Things Come Together, But...

Currently finished: Episode 9

If you ask me three episodes ago what I thought about this series, I'd tell you this is just another typical cryptically written story about ghosts and supernatural events that is mediocre at best. Now, three episodes later, I would say this is definitely more than just a typical ghost/supernatural anime, mostly because it made some quite interesting connections among different recurring elements of the story which had made many things from past episodes come together.

However, my praise stops there and let me tell you why.

There are many ways to bring surprises to audiences, the most brilliant one, is to laying out all elements ahead of time, but intentional mislead audience with full disclosure of all information and later comes back and say "ha, I fooled you!". In my opinion, that's the most interesting form of "unexpected surprises", but it takes a brilliant mind to construct one. If Shinrei Tantei Yakumo had managed to do that, I'd totally push it onto the seat of best anime of the season.

But it didn't. Instead, it took a much more commonly used form that I shall name it the "hidden information" ploy where at some point the story just comes out and say "By the way, there are some secret knowledge that you had no way of knowing until now". It requires very little effort to make, at the same time, doesn't feel nearly as satisfying.

I'm not saying that it's bad or anything, it's just that instead of becoming brilliant, it merely became "better than average" (if any at all).

Plus, with what this episode had just concluded, it felt like the story had just played its biggest trump card while there are still 4 episodes left to go. I wonder what they can do to make an arc that tops this one....