Anime Pilgrimage RTT

Yakitate!! Japan – episode 67

June 12, 2006 on 11:29 pm | In Yakitate!! Japan | Comments Off

“The sun vs. the blizzard!! The ultimate tart showdown!”

It’s a clear cut case of there being only three episodes remaining, as all of the trimmings that make one of these matches last two episodes are cut down for the sake of efficiency. Yet the laid-back attitude of the competitions had its appeal, so I’m not quite sure what to think.

Yukino is the opponent for the match, and the theme food is the tart. Turns out that Yukino sucks at bread but the blizzard hands that she was born with make her the Queen of Tarts. Off they go to somewhere in Chiba, to make tarts with strawberries and loquats!

Nobody chooses to question why someone who can’t bake bread has chosen to enter a bread baking contest. Nor do they contest the fact that she is a champion tart chef, and the board has turned up tarts as the theme for the match.
This is the most blatant of all of the rigs, even more so than the Norihei instance. I suppose that the Pantasia team couldn’t prove anything, and if they were to say anything they would just be booed away as spoilsports.

The most interesting thing about the episode is the treatment of time: traditional travel scenes and strategy huddles are cancelled in place of instant transmission to exactly the right times and places. Kanmuri explains this away as representative of Azuma’s passion for the loquat marketeer (a man who looks freakishly like Gollum), but it’s really just a time saving tactic. I miss the laissez-faire approach to baking that we once had, yet I understand the necessity of this tactic.

How it’s going to end in two episodes, I don’t know: especially as the next is a fantasy diversion! They’re on my HD right now, so we’ll have to find out.