Misunderstandings are the order of the day to try and get everyone’s personalities explored.
What They Say:
Kaito keeps imagining bad things about what happened with him an Ichika the night before, so he decides to skip school because he’s so embarrassed. Ichika doesn’t understand why he’s staying home so she starts to worry. Meanwhile, Kanna starts to worry about Kaito, as well, and goes to see how he’s doing after school secretly, but ends up being followed and recorded by Remon’s 8mm camera.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With Kaito and Ichika having settled into a routine fairly well when it comes to each other, there’s things that crop up that just thrown a spanner in the works. The latest comes with some bad dreams that Kaito has and that causes him to try and put some distance between himself and Ichika. Which is something she can’t quite understand well, though she starts to panic over the way she thinks it comes back to the events of the night prior where she was a bit more forward with him and he may have taken it wrong. And he may want to end up turning her in for what she really is if he’s figured it out. Suffice to say, Ichika runs herself through a couple of minor panic attacks over the whole thing.
Because of this, there’s a good bit of simple fun at school as Ichika talks with others like Remon about it and they all start making it more than it is, or at least it’s intimated that way which Ichika completely misunderstands. Everyone else is just surprised he’s not in school since he was fine the day before and that leads to general concern and people coming to visit to check on him. There’s a pleasant, laid back nature to all of this, but what makes it worse is that Kanna gets to Kaito first and the two head out for a bit. Everyone else sees this and realizes he wasn’t sick and their minds start to run the gamut of what the truth is about the situation. And for Ichika to catch sight of them as well while out, her mind just goes into overdrive.
The strength of the episode is that it gives the supporting cast a chance to shine a bit since they’re all out in the town after school. There are some simmering potential relationships under the surface here and seeing Kaito and Kanna together makes for some additional tension to be revealed, even as the players involved try and play it cool. There’s a lot of little silliness to all of this and it does humanize everyone a bit more, but there’s still a feeling that things are just fairly superficial in general. Which isn’t too bad considering the series and what it wants to do, but it doesn’t really engage you all that well either. When it focuses on both Kaito and Ichika as it does towards the end where they try to figure out what the other is thinking and come to some resolution, it does go back to the old canard of if they’d only talk with each other. And they do, lightly, so it helps to smooth things out a bit so that it can move on. Not that it did all that much here in general.
In Summary:
With the third episode of the series, we get the whole premise revolving around the idea that Ichika and Kaito know each other’s secrets and are in a panic over it. Of course, the secret they think the other knows isn’t what it is, but that doesn’t stop them from avoiding each other and causing all sorts of other little strains and tensions to surface. It’s cute and simple but it doesn’t do much to enamor me to the characters. While Ichika has the basic anime girl personality, something about Kaito keeps me from really connecting with him and liking him as a character. I can’t put my finger on it completely, but it’s a mixture of personality and character design. There are some fun bits to be had throughout with the supporting cast as well, and fans of Remon will like her antics and comments here, but for the most part it’s another episode where it’s just treading water and enjoying doing so.
Grade: B-
Readers Rating: [ratings]
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
