Just watched this; wow, it's absolutely incredible! Right up there with Berserk as one of my favourite animes, or indeed favourite TV episodes of all time, I'd highly recommend it to anyone.

** Below this line is rather spoilertastic **

The characters were all excellent, the show had charm in abundance and it's one of the rare occasions where I actually felt for most of the characters, even Fulle who merely played a bit-part in the overall storyline had a fantastic and emotional death scene, although the old cliched 'dying slowly by arrows in abundance' thing always goes down well with me, there's just something about it that makes you really feel for the character.

There was so much I wanted to discuss whilst watching it, but my mind's blank at the moment, but I'll finish by commenting how awfully crushing the end of the pen-ultimate episode was. I was watching it thinking "this is great, there's no way this can turn out to be a sad ending, hurrah! at least an anime with a happy ending" - and then bam! I should of known it was too good to be true, maybe I should of expected it, but I didn't, and that just made it so much more harrowing.

Fantastic.