After the semi-reset of the last episode, Tatami Galaxy gets underway once again with our nameless lead thrust once more into the world.
What They Say:
Membership has its privileges, but not for an unsuspecting college student forcibly initiated into the Secret Society Lucky Cat Chinese Restaurant! Will his covertly cruel conduct spoil a young man’s chance at love?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With a nod towards a previous episode involving bicycles and flying machines, Tatami Galaxy has our lead going into a new life where he’s fairly wealthy, at least in his mind, leading him to fancy dinners, high priced women and a whole lot of wine and song. At least for a few seconds through the opening montage before Akashi slaps him silly for being like he is, so focused on power instead of what’s truly important. Yet that small slap in the grand scheme of things hits him rather profoundly, even if he’s not aware of it at first, since it sparks something inside him about how his life should be lived.
What our lead ends up into when things get rolling is a new club called the Secret Society Lucky Cat Chinese Restaurant where there’s quite the interesting setup. To his surprise, it actually is a secret society that’s full of a lot of branches and circles that it uses to control the entire university through all the various means at its disposal. The Society is pretty detailed in what it knows as it showcases all of it to our lead with a lot of detail, enough so that it causes him to throw his lot in pretty quickly with them. He’s drawn in by the potential for power here as he understands what the possibilities are within the organization as a member of its Library Police, but it’s something that puts him on the wrong side of a lot of people which gives them a rather negative view of him. And considering one of his big college life dreams is to find a Japanese beauty to fall in love with, that’s not going to help in the slightest.
Our lead goes through several different jobs while involved in this Secret Society and invariably ends up falling in with Akashi. The two have their sweet moments but he’s still trying to figure out what job best suits him within the Society since he keeps screwing up, often through Ozu’s fault, and finds himself demoted repeatedly because of the embarrassment he causes. As the episode progresses, we see a lot of familiar threads and characters from the previous episodes, such as Jogansaki, through different angles as they become involved with our lead’s job. The problem again at this point, at least for me, is that even while it leaps about with different story ideas and settings, it’s all far too familiar and you expect it to go as it has for the last eight episodes. Though they may change the reboot aspect of it in some way, as we saw in the two part story, the end result will still be the same.
In Summary:
At this point, I’m watching Tatami Galaxy out of sheer inertia and because there should only be a few episodes left in it. The lives our lead goes through have their interesting moments but there’s still an overall lack of connection with him because he’s such a cipher, one that’s ever changing at that. I keep hoping that we’ll get some mystical key that will answer at least part of why all of this is going on which will help to change it into a series of interest, but each individual episode now only seems to serve to frustrate me because it’s not going anywhere. Well, not anywhere, but I haven’t found the point of this particular exercise of storytelling outside of proving that it can be done. There’s a lot to like about parts of it, but as a whole it’s slowly grinding away at my enjoyment. This is a show all about enjoying the individual journeys, which I can’t seem to, rather than the ride as a whole. When you watch the first episode and then the ninth episodes without anything inbetween and not really miss anything, that says something.
Grade: C+
Streamed By: Funimation
