What They Say:
It is said that a stony cat standing in a hill can make our dream come true. Asking for their wishes, the protagonists come to a hill and ask for their wishes to the cat. Then, for some reason or other, a high school boy loses the face he wears in public and his nickname becomes a pervert prince. A cute girl is deprived of her true feelings… The cat makes mischief to their relationship better and worse. What will become of them?
The Review:
Yokodera had only seen Azusa as someone – something – he needed to get his ‘facade’ back from the stony cat – but having seen the after-effects of her meeting with her old ‘friends’, he’s realised the cutie is broken, that she’s just a normal girl. This isn’t the game he’d thought it was, and now he’s feeling guilty – and despite his best efforts to patch things up with Azusa, she’s in no mood to listen…
Azusa’s issues aren’t so much cause by bullying as by friendly needling that seems to have gotten way out of hand – different cause, ultimately the same result, and being brought back into contact with the people responsible pushed Asuza right back into her shell. Yokodera realises this is something he can help put right, but it takes him a while to see that complete honesty is going to be the best approach to doing that.
Later, there’s a revelation about past meetings between Tsukiko and Yokodera – meetings that Tsukiko remembers, but since she was always wearing a mask for them Yokodera hasn’t drawn the connection yet. And he’s not catching Tsukiko’s hints, either.
Bonus points for Henneko for not messing around: when Yokodera realises his mistake with Azusa, there’s no second-guessing, no fooling around, no little plot-points to give anyone a reset or get things back the way they were without consequence. When you’ve been watching anime for a while, you get to expect plot shenanigans in situations like these, so I was hugely surprised and pleased when the resolution to Azusa’s issues was played more or less straight. It’s also done in a way that doesn’t go the Kotoura-san mood-whiplash route, which is also good – two shows of that ilk so close together would not have been a good thing.
The start of what seems to be the next arc, with Tsukiko, her dreams, and her issues with her sister, was also decent – not least because it gives us a chance to see Tsukiko with her full range of emotions again, albeit only in flashback.
The one downside to all this is that there’s a decidedly more serious tone to the episode than the opening episodes had – they were played almost purely for laughs, but while this episode still has Yokodera’s open ‘hentai prince’ nature and Tsukiko’s snark on full display, that’s not the centre of attention anymore – that’s shifted to the collective issues of its characters.
In Summary:
Despite the more serious tone, I still enjoyed this episode – the leads are such a joy to watch, whatever they’re up to, that they can carry the show through either comic or dramatic modes. I just hope it doesn’t get too serious along the way.
Content Grade: A-
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment: 27” Apple iMac, 2.9GHz Core i5, 32GB RAM, Mac OS X 10.8.3
