I see. Sounds amazing. It’s not your fault.
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)
Remember the dark undertones this show was introduced with? Well don’t expect them to play a role in every episode, because we’re getting about as lighthearted as you can. This one opens with a tease of what Yuuji initially suspects to be Amane attempting an assassination on him. But through stealthy surveillance, he learns the truth behind the sexual advances that Amane has been making since they met: if every girl is working to match a specific archetype, Amane is particularly ready for the H scenes from the source material of this series, and manages to give the censors some more work to do without even removing any clothes. So yeah, that’s about as intense as this episode gets, although some may consider such a scene to be more intense than any actual suspense or mystery could be. A note is made regarding Amane’s past, one of the few nuggets of genuine information to be gleaned from this episode, although it sounds like a somewhat questionable choice, seeming to make Amane the comical sex addict through actual mental problems caused by an accident. How that will all work out remains to be seen, because the issue only has time to be briefly mentioned before more wacky schoolgirl antics play out.
The rest of the episode really is just Yuuji having some very visual novel-like conversations with the girls around him in ways that don’t amount to much more than offering up some silly gag or finding another excuse to show a girl’s underwear. Yumiko must be the key to the plot that will presumably unfold in what’s looking more likely to be the very late stretch of the show, because she sure isn’t very active in these interactions. In fact, she’s basically a non-character among an extremely quirky cast, only chiming in to remind us of the important fact: none of them are normal.
Perhaps the other bit of interesting character exploration amidst the silliness, even if it’s really just for more gag humor, is that Yuuji is in fact capable of showing distress, and ends up the one struggling to come up with a solution to how an interaction has progressed. Whether the sleep deprivation he continually cites as the cause of this is something that will prove relevant to the more serious matters whenever they do get touched upon or simply a way to get Yuuji in an uncharacteristically uncomfortable situation remains unclear, but the former might be a better option simply because not only does it seem unlike him to behave in such a manner, but the repeated mentions of needing more sleep feel pointless with no real context. But I will say that I found this to be the one gag of the episode that was truly funny, showing Yuuji attempt to avoid a conversation he doesn’t want to be part of by cycling through seemingly safe and ambiguous responses like an NPC and watching the disaster (as he sees it, anyway) that occurs as a result.
In Summary:
Black bars and some visual touches aside, this really is your run-of-the-mill, eroge-based slice of life for the time being. In her brief appearance Yumiko makes sure we remember there’s something more going on, but otherwise it’s a bit underwhelming to just wait for anything to occur.
Grade: B-
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
HP Envy 14.
