The school takes a break from events revolving around serious fighting in order to give us a weak school festival episode.
What They Say:
It’s finally the day of the Saint Ishiyama School Festival and the big volleyball match! But the match doesn’t happen until the afternoon, so Furuichi decides to enjoy the school festival atmosphere, specifically the Maid Cafe that Azusa and her class are running. Unfortunately things get a bit out of hand…
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With the revelations that we’ve now had about the past for Oga and at least one of the 6 Holy Knights, the show has opted to break from the more serious back story we got and to do something a bit lighter once again. Which is welcome since as much fun as I’ve been having with the arc overall, the show succeeds the most when it’s just having fun and especially when Beel is used. And he’s been very lightly used as of late. What this episode wants to do is to get the school festival material going and have fun in that direction. And it does it pretty well by covering the basics, including making sure that the 6 Holy Knights are made even more holy by their maid/butler cafe where they earn themselves even more adoring fans.
The whole situation turns pretty intense and wacky in a way as Furuichi tries to work things so as to help out Azusa with her maid cafe which isn’t doing so well. What it ends up doing more so is inspiring Aoi to jump in and do what she can to help out Azusa to strike back against the six, but is kind of befuddled that it means she has to wear a maid outfit. And Furuichi is able to take it continually further by framing it as a fight of sorts against the knights and is able to draw in more surprising people to wear the outfits and “do battle” by believing it’s a preliminary match. At the same time, Oga and Beel for their part are just enjoying the festival, which has them strolling through the booths and just generally getting into a whole lot of trouble.
In Summary:
For the most part though, the episode is very heavily padded with little in the way of anything happening. It has the potential with its premise to be fun but it sort of drags things out more than anything else and it shuffles both Oga and Beel off for the majority of the episode and mostly just squaring off with someone by saying he can eat a whole lot. There is fun with the cute girls in the maid cafe aspects and I’m glad that they minimized the gang of six’s upper crust appearance greatly, but what they can do with Azusa and her cafe just never seems to click. It has gross out moments that are amusing and it brings in some other punks for them to square off against, but it’s all just very, very weak.
Grade: C
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.
