What They Say:
Kenjiro Hata, notable for creating Hayate the Combat Butler, also created the new series Hayate the Combat Butler! Can’t Take My Eyes Off You. In this series, Hayate Ayasaki continues to work alongside Maria at the Nagi Sanzenin’s mansion. Nagi receives a call from “Area 51” inviting her to the universe but will she accept?
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With the third episode of the series being a bit of a mixed bag by focusing on Alice, it’s hard to be sure where the show will really go from there in a way. Alice wasn’t someone who made much of an appearance in the series before, being more of a manga creation, so there was the welcome aspect of really doing something new yet connected. But for those who had been watching but not familiar with the manga, it left you somewhat uncertain about what they would really be doing here. But what I felt was that while it was awkward at times, it showed that this series wasn’t going to be bound too tightly by certain rules and just wants to highlight the girls and that means some of the supporting characters that rarely get decent time could shine here.
This episode brings its focus initially on Sakuya and Isumi and their kind of off humor, something that Sakuya just doesn’t handle well, and it plays with the pairing well from the start as they’re both so different. For Isumi, who is now fourteen, she’s feeling rather left out of things when it comes to her peers as she doesn’t have any maids of her own. Only in anime…. Anyway, this gets Hayate involved as the search is one to find some suitable maids for her and his brilliant suggestion is handing out flyers. Which you just know will go over well. The first half deals well with the selection process and some of the other quirks of things, and an admittedly amusing commercial break sequence involving Isumi and her mastery of cell phones.
Being that the episode is about both Isumi and Sakuya, the second half focuses more on Sakuya herself, which is mildly fun as it goes along and we see some of her quirks and the way she is around her bodyguards and the like. Sakuya’s not one that ever interested me all that much for who she is and what her personality is like, and this episode doesn’t change that. She gets some decent time with Hayate and Nagi which challenges her to think about things a bit, and some careful words from others in her residence reinforces it, but her half of the episode is the kind that feels lighter and without much meat to it in general. Things are kind of bland for a good chunk of her story, but it picks up a bit more when Isumi returns to picture and we get to see that the two definitely are better together than apart.
In Summary:
The advantage to the series in being about specific girls is that it really does give each of them time to shine, even if you go with a routine like this where it’s split in half for two of them. Isumi and Sakuya work together better so there’s something to be said for those scenes in comparison to when they’re apart, and Isumi doesn’t get a lot of alone time here in general. But even with that said, the two characters are some of the much weaker tier of characters within the sprawling cast that makes up Hayate the Combat Butler, so that leaves the episode feeling kind of bland overall. I liked the parts with Isumi more in the first half and the hunt for her to get some maids, but that just sort of petered out as it went on and the energy was lost as it shifted to Sakuya’s story unfortunately.
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.
