Summer, yukatas, and yakuza!
What They Say:
“Festival Day”
Raku runs into Chitoge at the festival. Seeing that many things come free when she is with Raku, Chitoge decides to hang out with him. However, there is only one thing on Raku’s mind… To purchase a romantic relationship charm!
The Review: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
It’s really hard to not just say, “I really liked this episode” and be done with it. But this episode was simply really enjoyable fluff. Festival episodes often are.
Raku’s working one of his family’s stands (they have several) when he leaves to give some food to the other yakuza members. He runs into Chitoge and hijinks ensue. It’s actually kind of adorable, because we basically see their growth as a couple in the one episode. First she’s kind of standoffish and then warms up and finally falls in love only to be met with misconception.
Nisekoi is really good as misconception, and playing with expectations. Raku meets all of his prospective love interests in the episode (the episode suffers a little for it, since it just feels like a series of jokes instead of anything) and they each subvert expectations in some little way. My favorite was when he met Marika, who thinks that Raku is making a move on her. In reality, he just doesn’t want her to scare the cat. This could be easily played to be pretty stupid, but it works here. The audience knows what’s going on, but Marika’s reactions and acting are spot on.
Tsugumi suffers, though. She gets a mere few minutes in the episode, with the assumption that Shu maybe did something to warrant being beat up again by Tsugumi after he was already beaten by Miyamoto. She gets what she’s looking for, just a little love thing, but it isn’t given enough time to be satisfactory. But perhaps that’s the point, because she’s so behind in this love race, so to speak.
Onodera gets the most screen time out of the girls, or perhaps just eclipsed by Chitoge. Actually, Chitoge probably gets more screen time, but I feel like Onodera’s time was better spent. She and Raku meet up accidentally after he and Chitoge get separated accidentally. The time they spent together was short, but telling. More than anything, the two are like an awkward young couple that doesn’t quite know what to do in each other’s presence yet and that’s a little endearing.
The final scene captures something that I like about Chitoge a lot though. She has these innocent misconceptions of Japanese culture that make her a little cute when she finds out she’s wrong. But she’s so prideful. We get this from her shunning Raku away even though she knows she loves him. It’s as if her first disposition toward him was the right one and anything else would be admitting defeat.
In Summary:
I guess I did have a few words in me, but they’re more about how these short scenes play in the larger context of the show, which I very much enjoy. Despite this, the episode was very weird because there were some choice moments, like with Marika. But then others felt rushed through, like with Tsugumi. And others still felt padded, like with Chitoge. Nisekoi has put in a string of really good episodes these past few weeks though, so I suppose I’ll give them the pass this time around. It just feels like a chapter or two was mushed into an episode when it needed a bit more.
Grade: B-
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Equipment: Radeon 7850, 24” Dell UltraSharp U2410 set at 1920 x 1200, Creative GigaWorks T20 Series II
