The Great 2018 Video Game Challenge (Topic Two)

After a long break, I finally went back to continue Monogatari, watching the first three arcs of Owarimonogatari (Ougi Formula, Sodachi Riddle, and Sodachi Lost). Monogatari has had its ups and downs for me, ranging from the 10/10 Hanekawa arcs to the 1/10 Nisemonogatari arcs. I didn't hate these three, but they were definitely closer to the bottom than the top. Most of it was just boring. It didn't feel like a Monogatari story either, even the visuals and text screens felt phoned in.

All three of these arcs were about Sodachi, and the more I learned about her, the less I cared. The more the plot unfolded, the less sense it made, too. The first arc was learning about some pointless cheating incident (I get that there wound up being an actual conspiracy, but I just don't see why it mattered so much. The people who studied did better on average, how suspicious! We'd better have a trial to get to the bottom of this!). The second arc was learning why Araragi loves math. I'll admit I haven't watched Monogatari in awhile, but has his love of math come up even once at any point before this? And if it did, does it really need an origin story? Regardless, the tutoring was Sodachi's roundabout way to get Araragi to tell his police officer parents about her abusive family. The sheer stupidity of this whole arc didn't become clear until the next one, but for now I was just amazed that Araragi is apparently the least perceptive person in the world to not notice anything, and he also has the memory of a goldfish to have forgotten a girl he spent a whole summer with.

Anyway, the third arc revealed that they had met even earlier than that when Araragi's parents rescued her. Just... what. The police were already aware of her situation then. And, after apparently responding to the situation and finding it so severe that they removed the child from her parents, she just... wandered back? And no one stopped her? No one looked for her in the most likely place to look? No one cared? That's not how child endangerment works. Araragi is still an idiot (I mean, you really needed forty clues to work out what happened to her mom, I got it the instant they made a big deal about the door being locked even though it wasn't relevant to the story, practically making it a neon sign of a clue) but none of this is his fault, either.

The only thing that I might have cared about from any of this was finally learning something about Ougi, but aside from Hanekawa finding her dangerous there wasn't anything interesting on that front either. Just a lot of back-and-forths that didn't go anywhere. Ah well, the next arc in this season is apparently about Shinobu and not Sodachi/Ougi, so hopefully I'll like it better.
---
**R.O.B.A.Z.O.I.D**

Anime and Manga Topic 206: I have many many sales