The competition continues (to be dragged out) with more silliness abound.
What They Say:
It’s the second to last round, and it’s a battle of love between the pitch perfect rich girl and the klutzy, head-in-the-clouds Roman-tic! Which one of the will break their team’s hearts?
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
The big competition that is definitely no longer about the special virtual prize that was being sought after at the beginning of the arc moves through its next phase, thankfully dealing with the second to last round for a bit before going into the final round itself. This round has a little bit of amusing material to it that should make fans enjoy it, but it’s hard to imagine thousands of people showing up in a stadium for such an event. But considering what people will show up for, you never know. The focus of this part of the competition brings in a couple of the girls from each team who do their best to woo a young man named Tadoroko as best as they can.
The time spent on the romance game is unfortunately a bit short since it has a lot of cute moments as the girls do their best to win him over in very traditional forms and you can get behind Tadoroko with it as they each really have a fun approach, especially from Mamorin on the student council. There’s something to be said for the absurdity of having a game of seduction like this in its most polite form as part of a competition between two teams in the final rounds of a big game. Thankfully, they don’t stretch out the events of this match too long, unlike what we’ve seen before, and it instead finishes out so they can deal with the match between Bossun and the student council president, Agata, who contrary to the way he presents himself to the outside world, is quite the nasty guy when it comes to his personality.
The two end up playing a card game called Pixie Garden between each other inside a sealed room, which is a bit unusual no matter how you look at it. Everything is broadcast so everyone can see it so you can say that doing it this way allows them to concentrate better. But shouldn’t that have been allowed for other matches as well? The card game does have its fun as it progresses and we see these two going against each other for all their worth when it comes to a compressed amount of time and the intensity of it all, especially when you add in the color commentary from those on the outside. Bossun does come across well when the chips are down and there are some fun twists to be had with it, but it still doesn’t salvage the episode from its overall problems of being a largely uninteresting series of matches.
In Summary:
Sket Dance finishes out the Bibage Battle with a fairly decent mix of competitions when you get down to it, but it all feels like it was just hastily thrown together and without any real meaning or merit. The credits sequence handles a lot of what it really comes down to when you get to it, but that comes across as forced and practically pointless. There are things I liked about it at times, but competitions like this aren’t the kinds of things that fits with how Sket Dance works. A one off episode would be fine, but three or more episodes dealing with this Bibage Battle garbage? It took the wind out of the sails of this series pretty hard and has turned it from a pleasant diversion to a show I’m just about ready to avoid, which is good since there’s only one more episode left.
Grade: C
Simulcast By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
