City Hunter 2 - episodes 8 to 13

City Hunter 2 continues to run the gamut of City Hunter-ness; the cool, the stupid, the funny and the pointless. One could say that this series has it all and they'd be just about right.

The biggest problem with this series is that too many episodes start with Kaori advertising Ryo's services. He's an underworld bodyguard, dangit! Keep him a damned secret! However, the shopping district always happens to be a good place to meet new clients. When Ryo acts as someone's fiancée after being picked out , this gives birth to hilarious police comedy involving Ryo borrowing a police car. It also shows that sometimes concerned fathers are just concerned parents and not trying to ruin their daughters' lives - and this episode also shows the only act of violence against a woman Ryo has ever committed (the other time it was technically against a transsexual).

In Ryo's other adventures he gets official police dispensation to grope an officer, we learn that it is every man's dream to "mokkori with a noble".
There is a country in this world where peeking is punishable by death, which is quite cool. This leads us to another "internationally flavoured" episode of City Hunter. Guests from overseas in City Hunter are inevitably princesses or prodigies from non-existent Middle-Eastern or Teutonic countries. Salina and Alma, in this case, are a princess in disguise as a lady-in-waiting and a ten year old lady-in-waiting with an IQ of 250 (this facet of her character is introduced quite an awkward fashion) pretending to be the aforementioned princess. This two parter, about noble aura preventing mokkori, proves that everyone comes to Japan in order to be targeted for death and saved from horrible fates. That's just the way it goes.
Despite any foregone conclusions that can be drawn, "Mokkori Killer" had a very sweet ending.

Kamiya Akira really can't be praised enough for his work in City Hunter. A lot of the dialogue is boring, but the way he delivers makes it funny. "Oh! Weapon Attack! No!" is only hilarious when you actually hear him saying it. Otherwise, it would simply be dull and flat. A lot of his work was likely hell on the throat, particularly with the extremes of smooth to un- in the space of a sentence.

Anyway, City Hunter 2 is pretty damned funny. Not just because of its corrupt business-men jumping from exploding boats and miraculously surviving: it is actually getting more daring in its visual representation of jokes. Although there are very few serious, or indeed actual clients any more, there's still enough entertainment here.