What They Say:
Fuyuumi Ai has forced the club to shut down. Masuzu wants Eita to get closer to her and find a weakness.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
If you’ve watched your fair share of harem anime, you’ll literally be surprised exactly zero times over the course of this episode.
Earlier on, the series had bumped around some ideas of its own and made them work with the simple, if quite unoriginal, love triangle that was being centered around. As the initial little stories were wrapped up and the story needed to continue, more characters started being introduced and some much clearer displays of the tropes of harem anime that have been used to death in the past several years especially started making themselves more prevalent, but other plots were also popping up in mixing in, leaving us to wonder what will happen next with them.
This time, though, it’s pretty clear-cut. The final main female that we’ve been expecting from the opening and ending joins the story, not as a member of the club just yet, as she actually has it disbanded (oh boy, I wonder if maybe she’ll go back on that decision and become the fifth member herself!), but as a member of the group that can be unquestionably called Eita’s harem at this point. The girls fight, the newbie is completely smitten with Eita for no discernible reason, and Eita continues to have absolutely no idea that any female may have some interest in him (well, maybe the one who crawls into his bed naked and rolls around bragging that she got to embrace her lover).
And there are plenty more harem clichés to which a remarkable amount of time is dedicated in this episode. I wish I could say it was an exaggeration, but there’s just not a hint of any original ideas floating around this time. That’s not to say the series has completely lost it (which isn’t to say it… hasn’t); the elements introduced earlier but not yet followed through on are surely still in play, and will surface before too long. There’s certainly no guarantee that they will be executed in any more satisfying a manner than what we got this time, but a little something to at least have the possibility of keeping us guessing would be a nice touch.
Even with all those seemingly condemning words having been said, though, it’s not as if someone interested enough in this series to be watching it through this point should be too shocked and appalled at such developments. Any plot summary or key art (or translation of the title!) should prove pretty indicative of this show giving us a lot of what we’ve seen before. There can always be hope of something new and exciting, and this series has offered a little bit of that here and there, but ultimately, it’s hard to be too surprised that things are turning out the way they are. We’re still only seven episodes in and we’ve seen that this series can change its face a little at times, so there’s still always a chance for it to live up to whatever hopes one might have.
In Summary:
This episode is a whole ton of harem clichés thrown into our story that has been tossing them around a fair amount since its beginnings. Being able to predict absolutely everything that’s going to happen at any given point is a bit unsatisfying, but these things happen when you’re dealing with properties of this sort. As it stands, there are still interesting elements to later come forward.
Grade: C+
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Custom-Built PC, 27” 1080p HDTV.
