It’s important to keep your most sensitive possessions in your sight at all times, especially around violent girls with complexes.
What They Say:
Episode 4: “Fugashi, Fugashi, and… / Glico, Glico, and…”
Hotaru challenges Kokonotsu to compete in a blind fugashi taste test. She also helps him to run back to Café Endo when he realizes that he forgot something very important to him at the café.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
The first half was entirely educational…at least to the degree that you find learning about different kinds of sweet snacks interesting and informative. Frankly, I found it a bit boring, all of this discussion of the different kinds of fugashi that are available. Sure, the point of the segment was cheap sexual thrills with the suggestive dialogue and poses coming from Hotaru. But it was not particularly titillating nor funny, not even when Yo Shikada walks in at the end and immediately takes things the wrong way.
The second half managed a slightly better mixture of information and humor, largely because the running race was played for laughs as a life or death struggle. The setup, however, was quite cliched, as To (established as an irredeemable pervert) sets up trouble for Kokonostsu when he “adjusts” and annotates the sketches Kokonotsu made of Hotaru and Saya in his sketching notebook (we have to remind the audience that he still has dreams of becoming a manga author). The information about Glico’s caramels and the relationship to the running figure mascot was quite interesting, especially for those of us overseas who likely only know of the company and its branding from anime and manga.
What was not as interesting was the denouement, which was fairly obvious to figure out because we already know all that we need to know about the character and personality of Saya and how she would react to the annotations and adjustments that To added to Kokonotsu’s notebook. And, of course, that she would interpret them to be Kokonotsu’s thoughts on the matter (the density in both of these characters could possibly out-gravity-draw a black hole).
There just wasn’t as much of the funny in this episode and my fears of the formula getting a little tiresome may well be slowly being realized.
In Summary:
Kokonotsu and Hotaru have a blind-tasting competition over fugashi. It’s followed up by a madcap run from Shikada Dagashi to the Endo Cafe when Kokonotsu leaves behind a very important notebook there and needs to get to it before Saya catches a glimpse of what’s inside. The laughs come more from the running segment than anything else.
Grade: B+
Streamed By: FUNimation
Review Equipment:
Apple iMac with 12GB RAM, Mac OS 10.10 Yosemite
