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 Hayate the Combat Butler! Cuties entering its final two episodes, it’s not much of a surprise that they’ll try and change things up a bit. And in a way, they really need to as the previous episode reinforced for many that Maria is the girl to beat when it comes to truly pairing up Hayate. And when you look at so many of the other girls in the series this season so far, it’s really no contest at all as it progressed. The show had a good element of fun and whimsy about it with the right amount of nudging romance and slight seriousness to give it just enough weight. This episode takes the formula of the last ten episodes though and pretty much chucks it out the window in favor of a two part serious storyline that gets a big nod towards being written by Kenjiro Hata.
The premise of this story is one that doesn’t play well for the majority of what we get in this episode, first with some strange black and white old style dream sequences involving Hayate arguing with a clock and dealing with a cute tanuki that’s pretty well housebroken. It provides some moments towards the larger story, almost as a narration of events in a way at times, but it doesn’t really serve the episode in an engaging way but rather just for some easy laughs. The bulk of the episode focuses on Hayate being thrust into a position that’s not made clear where he has to kiss someone. And the episode has him spending his time searching for someone that he can do that with while not making a big deal of it with them.
Because of that, it leaps from place to place quickly and drags in a number of the girls along the way, which leads to some cute smaller sequences but a frustrating larger narrative as the reason for the madness just isn’t there and is deferred until the next episode. Doing all of this with kiss dreams along the way, you definitely have to like some of the situations as they unfold, and in particular the one with Maria when it’s revealed that they didn’t do a kiss dream with her because it was too scary. But these small laughs, as fun as they are at times, are done with the problems of the episode as a whole being poorly connected. Perhaps it works within manga form, but as presented here, it just left you feeling put off by it all.
In Summary:
After a strong episode, relatively speaking, previously, Hayate the Combat Butler quickly returns to form of sorts with a weaker episode here. But instead of its focus on one or two girls and the situation at hand, it throws a lot of them into the mix and sets it all to confusion as they go through kiss dreams with regards to Hayate and he copes with his own issues with it. It’s poorly setup, left a bit too mysterious for much of it, and has such an odd and unusual pacing at times that it just gets to be a bit much. Especially with everyone so focused on the kissing itself, which just drags the gag through the mud by the end and you just want to be done with it.
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.
