What They Say:
Haruka arrives at the student council training camp to provide cooking. As Taito and Haruka get cozy together, Himea distances herself from Taito. Once Izumi sees what’s happening, she comes up with a plan to help Himea… Kurosu was quietly watching them. The summer beach is fraught with innocent love and not so innocent schemes.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
While the idea of training has been a decent one, it didn’t exactly win anyone over in the previous episode and it didn’t give us enough fanservice and fun either to balance it. What threw a monkeywrench into things was the arrival of Haruka on the island at a time when Himea and Taito were getting along really well. It just made everyone uncomfortable and you can imagine those that aren’t involved just rolling their eyes at the foolishness unfolding in front of them. The whole thing has also pushed Gekkou a lot as it’s just another distraction and annoyance and he’s not pleased with Kurosu bringing Haruka into the mix when he wants to get much more serious about everything. Everyone is having fun on some level and he wants nothing to do with any of that.
While the silliness abounds, Himea is still feeling a whole lot of conflict in herself and it’s dredging up some memories. Really beautifully animated ones where we see that colorful mess of clouds and the like that’s like a nebula. Those bits from the beginning of the series were a huge draw to this show, but it’s largely petered out since then. These moments are few and far between but it shows a really strong sense of design and beauty to things, which we don’t get with most of the characters most of the time as it’s fallen into predictable, wonky and oddly executed stories. With this episode focusing on the training camp, there continues to be little training. And the reasoning for bringing Haruka into the mix is supposedly that she’ll help with the cooking. It’s so thin at best that you just have to kind of sigh about it.
While there are undercurrents of things going on here, it’s not exactly high end material. The focus is on the smaller things, the characters themselves, but nothing that really differentiates them from each other. Games of walking through the woods at night with a flashlight in pairs are certainly familiar, and they do try to ease some of the tensions between characters by having some revelations made to each other about who they are, what they know and all, but it’s just so empty of real meaning that it’s disheartening to watch. Much of what this boils down to though is that Kurosu is just watching everyone, taking in everything and making his mental notes about what they’re capable of. He has his larger goals in mind but they’re still largely ill defined so as to not matter. And at nine episodes in, that’s pretty dangerous.
In Summary:
The point of this episode is that there is no point. To be fair, it’s all about showing the characters getting more comfortable with each other and that’s an important thing. If they actually made the characters ones that you can care about. After this many episodes, it’s failed to pull things together anywhere near well enough to make it work. Some shows sort of just muddle through things but this one is like trudging through it with a heavy weight attached to you. It has some interesting ideas at its core that are either poorly executed or never used well and it has some beautiful design ideas but isn’t able to back it up with strong story elements. Considering how many manga and novels there are for this, I expected more coherence, but then I remember it’s from the same guy behind the Legend of Legendary Heroes and I come back to reality quickly.
Grade: C-
Streamed By: Nico Nico
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.
