Go to the Beach With Me? x It’s Not a Matter of Knowing or Not
What they say:
A beautiful girl named Guri, who has a mysterious item that forces two random people to kiss and turns them into couples, appears in front high school student, Aino Seiji. Despite being dressed up as a shinigami, she’s actually cupid. Suddenly, Guri tries to kiss Seiji, and then… Unavoidable and uncontrollable–A forceful love comedy that starts with an angel and a kiss!!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Love Tyrant has thus far relied on random ass shenanigans filled with harem tropes and fan service to tell its story, and it’s done a decent job so far, but episode 6 feels like it’s either trying too hard to be serious, too hard to be random, and sometimes both. Divided into two different segments, which I can only guess means this was based on two different manga chapters, this particular episode is one that could have been much stronger if it had a better focus on the story.
It starts off with a beach episode. Seiji, Akane, Guri, Yuzu, and Seiji’s sister Akua, are off to the beach to have some fun in the sun. Of course, Akua is depressed because she thought she’d be going alone with her big bro. Similarly, Guri doesn’t seem to enjoy the sun, and so she remains underneath the umbrella for a good portion of the first half—until she and Akane challenge each other to a duel that involves smacking a volleyball around.
The biggest problem with this episode was that it tried too hard to be random. While randomly zany acts are par for the course with this anime, Love Tyrant has always made the zaniness somehow work in conjunction with the story. Not so in episode 6. Maybe it’s because the entire episode feels like a pointless one, but I felt like none of the humor was on point. Really, the most interesting aspects about this first half was Akane’s boobs, learning more about Akane’s and Yuzu’s past, Akane’s boobs, seeing more of Seiji’s strong moral character, and Akane’s boobs.
By the way, did I mention Akane’s boobs? They’re so on point in this anime that I think they’ve become one of the underlying subplots.
Even the bit of insight we gain into Akane’s psyche and thoughts are overshadowed by the sheer unbelievableness of what’s happening in this episode. You might remember Stolas the demon penguin from episode 3. Well, he comes back and fights Akane… and he actually does a good job of nearly beating her. I wouldn’t mind if he came back to wreak havoc, but the way he just appeared didn’t make much sense, and not even the randomness of this series could convince me that what happened could really happen.
The second half is even more random than the first half, but it plays up the humor a bit better, though I still think it could have been smoother overall. The second mini-arc has Seiji and company at a school in the middle of the night. Their reason is to help a couple that apparently fell in love but are having problems. Guri wants to add the two into her Kiss Note, aka the iphone she got from a fellow cupid several episodes ago, but they’re stopped from doing so when several ghosts randomly show up and cause problems. She also remembered Seiji’s lecture from a previous episode about not adding just anyone into the Kiss Note. I suppose you could say Guri has learned a valuable lesson from Seiji.
In Summary:
I feel like this particular episode was not as strong nor as funny as the previous episodes. This is probably natural. Comedies, especially harem comedies, all have a major issue with the humor either being a hit or miss. In this case, episode 6 was definitely a miss for a good portion of the time. On the plus side, half of it was a beach episode, so we got to see Akane’s boobs defy the laws of gravity many times.
Grade: C+
Streamed by: Crunchyroll
