The secret revealed – but do we care?
What They Say:
While looking for her bicycle, Naru and Hayato run into Ai. A battle for love between two young girls unfolds on Globe Street that night… Even while caught between the girls, Hayato gathers information on the R Wings of the previous night’s battle. Shusuke and Hiyoko’s relationship slowly begins to improve when they are attacked by a mysterious man wearing a hat. Hiyoko attempts to protect Shusuke, and Shusuke loses consciousness… Their stories intertwine.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
After the previous episode focused rather heavily on a seemingly pointless and decidedly uninteresting gang rumble with characters that were highly annoying, where can the show go from here? Surprisingly, it can go lower, but considering that the series has been rough around the edges and in the middle since the start, it really shouldn’t surprise me. With the show working along two decidedly uninteresting storylines and lead characters, it really doesn’t matter which one it follows at times. The only mildly amusing part of the show continues to be the prologue where it lets various female characters go wild. It’s kind of sad that that moment is a highlight.
The show gets underway with the storyline between Hayato and Naru again as he comes along to help her out in finding her lost bicycle. There’s a certain awkwardness between the two characters to begin with, though she doesn’t flash as much fanservice as the wait staff does at the restaurant, but with the nature of these two it just makes you feel uneasy. Of course, their mission together, where he appears very disinterested in it overall, gets off to a rocky start when Ai and Alice show up, which means cute blondes that are polar opposites adding different kinds of energies to the mix. How Hayato doesn’t just up and leave in the middle of it all is beyond me. Panty flashes aren’t anything new, even with younger looking characters, but something about this show just rubs the wrong way and it feels very… wrong.
With the show shifting between that and the restaurant storyline, we get the full mix of women and there’s even a changing room scene for those that need the fanservice, which is all that this show really has going for it. What this episode does do however is, after four episodes, makes clear exactly what the deal is with these characters in that Chitose and Hayato are different personalities of the same person. I had accidentally found out about this at the first episode when researching some of the basics of the show, and it was the only thing keeping me going in being curious as to how they were going to flesh it out. I’m surprised it took this long to get there though since the show didn’t exactly endear itself to the viewing audience with its execution and overall approach.
In Summary:
With the final revelation about what the deal is with Chitose and Hayato, the series finally makes sense. Hah. As if. While this does make certain things clear, it doesn’t actually make the show interesting, which is the main problem with it all. They do try to have a good bit of fun with it at the very end in making it clear about the diverse personalities that are here, but the show has made me not care or even like any of these guys from the start that I can’t imagine finding myself sympathetic towards them now, even knowing what I do about them. The girls have their moments here and there, but you know that they exist purely for the attentions of the men and the lurid moments that get created surrounding them, so they’re empty and lifeless as well, essentially just more caricatures. The show had an opportunity with the way the men are designed in their personalities and situations to do something neat, but it failed in just about every way. This continues to be a trainwreck where you just want to see if it blows up in our faces even more than it has.
Grade: F
Simulcast 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.
