What They Say:
Kyosuke Kosaka, a normal 17-year-old high school student living in Chiba, has not gotten along with his younger sister Kirino in years. For longer than he can remember, Kirino has ignored his comings and goings and looked at him with spurning eyes. It seemed as if the relationship between Kyōsuke and his sister, now fourteen, would continue this way forever. One day however, Kyosuke finds a DVD case of a magical girl anime which had fallen in his house’s entrance way.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Having enjoyed the first season a fair bit, more than I expected considering what the material could be thought of, I was pretty glad to hear that Oreimo was getting a second season. The show of a brother and sister with their own problems like this aren’t rare in anime, but a lot of them get to be pretty hard to watch depending on which angle they go with. Oreimo, for the most part for me, managed to find a decent balance of pervy and over the top situations as it dealt with Kyosuke and his younger sister Kirino. Bringing these two back for another round is something that just generally makes me smile.
Time has passed but things are still the same in some ways, especially with the way Kirino lounges around and Kyosuke can’t help but to notice that she is growing into a young woman quite well. Amusingly, with Kirino now back in the house after being away for awhile, she’s doing a pretty good job of ignoring him while being aware of the way he’s staring at her at times. There’s a certain brother/sister dynamic here in play that, as a parent, is all too familiar with the way that snap and snip at each other. But there’s also a little more to it since she was involved in the study abroad program and Kyosuke managed to “force” her back home and that’s raised the tension from her end a fair bit. To the point where he’d even be okay with the unwelcome attention he had gotten before.
The tension is what fills the episode as she tries to get her life back in order, with her father cutely wanting to be there to protect her along the way, but she’s created a significant buffer between her and Kyosuke that’s really getting him down in a big way. It does make for a kind of low key and almost somber opening episode as they go through these motions, but it’s when Kirino makes her way to Akihabara that she truly comes alive and we see the part of her that is just so utterly fun and cute to watch. When she shows off the list of things she’s missed while being overseas, the panic is definitely in Kyosuke’s eyes, but the utter joy in her as she goes on a huge treasure hunt is just beautiful to watch. When things make Kirino happy, they make her happy to her core.
In Summary:
Oreimo kicks off its second season here and it takes a bit to really get back on track, but that’s because there are some character issues to deal with when it comes to Kirino’s return. It’s interesting to see the way that Kyosuke is feeling so left out of things with the way she keeps to herself and brushes him off for so long, and I liked seeing the way that we got her father trying to keep himself inserted in his life. There’s some nice nods made towards the friends and the reconnect that’s going on, which will be moved past pretty quickly I suspect, but the real joy is just in watching Kirino return to her true promised land towards the end here and seeing life truly re-enter her at this point. This is an awkward kind of opening episode, especially since they had to use the OVAs to fix the previous seasons TV ending, but the show should kick along well from here on out.
Grade: B
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.
