Beautiful friendship and eventual love always blossom from stationery attacks.
What They Say:
Mihama Academy is a prison-like school built to preserve fruit that has fallen too far from its tree. It is home to five female students who each have their reasons for enrolling in the academy and live their life idly within the walls of Mihama. One day, Kazami Yuuji the institute’s first male student arrives and throws the orderly rhythm of Mihama off balance. Is Yuuji what the girls need to hold of their lives once more, or will the weight of their pasts prove too steep a wall to overcome? Or is his past even heavier than any of the others?
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
After a foreboding end to the first episode, this series presses on with something of a more typical episode of its genre in many ways, albeit with a perpetual air of mystery accentuated by the letterboxed format that never changes (which also means the studio has to do significantly less to fill out each frame, so points for that, I guess). Yuuji seems to understand his role as a harem protagonist quite well, spending his idle time connecting with each of the girls around him.
It’s definitely an episode all about the characters, as many episodes in such a show will be. Although the episode is titled after Yumiko, she again doesn’t appear the most, although there’s certainly more development with her character both in terms of her past (or at least the very surface of it) and her future with Yuuji as a part of her world. In some ways she’s the core of Mihama Academy’s student body, being the first member and the one always concerned with the new additions. As more is discussed regarding how each student came to the school, there’s a lot of teasing for when we’ll eventually learn the aspects of what makes each of them unique.
For now, it seems the trend is for each to embody an archetype as accurately as possible. Michiru has made her position as the tsundere quite clear and Sachi is equally serious about her role as a maid. We got the least of Makina in the first episode and possibly even more of her than Yumiko in this one, establishing her as not only the obnoxiously infantile loli but also as the designated imouto despite no familial ties. It’s easier to take when it’s something like Michiru clearly acting the part as a comedy routine, but I can stay optimistic and say Makina’s actions fit under the same paradigm. Amane continues to be possibly the most unusual character in a questionable but somewhat refreshing way; she drops the pretenses from her naked time in Yuuji’s room and goes straight to playing hardcore footsies with him while trying to have a serious conversation. She’s definitely an interesting one to watch, and he’s the perfect match for her.
The obsession with showing panty shots continues to be something I’m generally not thrilled about, but when this episode gets to the one that makes a point of being right in your face rather than the relatively surreptitious attempts in other scenes, it actually results in one of the genuinely funniest moments of the episode. It’s as clear to the rest of the main cast as it is to the audience, and Michiru bursts out in laughter only to realize that the others have managed to pair up and converse over whatever nothingness they could conjure up in time, causing a Michiru freak-out that’s quickly becoming one of her most endearing features.
In Summary:
Although not especially bad, this episode lacked a lot of the tension and intrigue of the first, and gives the impression that the series may not deliver on the more enticing concepts until its last few episodes. For now we can at least have some fun with the characters, vanilla as it may seem.
Grade: B-
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Custom-Built PC, 27” 1080p HDTV.
