Tuesday 19 August 2008

Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu - Episode 6

No anime series invoking or involving otaku and anime culture in any way, shape or form would be complete without some kind of Comiket-based episode, and so Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu gets this must-have storyline in early (which I'm sure has nothing to do with the fact that this episode aired on the day Summer Comiket 2008 started), with Haruka and Yuuto visiting the show.

Just as the last episode of this series proved to be highly predictable, I'm sure you could pan out this particular instalment in your head without watching the episode with an equal degree of ease. Packed trains, long queues, out of stock doujinshi, and so on - It's all been done before, and if I'm totally honest it's all been done a lot better by other series.


That isn't to say that this particular episode is a complete dead loss - Haruka is at her sweetest and most believable as a character when it comes to her anime and manga obsession, and Yuuto is still turning out to be a thoroughly decent guy, with this episode also keeping us freed from the probable future hardships of that oh-so obvious love triangle looming on the horizon. So, 'nice' is probably the best word to describe this instalment - It won't make you laugh out loud much, it certainly won't blow you away with any deep or shocking revelations (although it does leave us with an intriguing cliffhanger), but it does do a reasonably solid job of depicting both the good and bad of Comiket while also translating the sheer scale of the event (especially to a first-time visitor) in a decent enough manner.

I'm not sure whether this cliffhanger is going to shake things up somehow, but to be honest the series at large probably needs it to pull the show out of its current realm of predictability. As I seem to keep mentioning, this isn't a bad series by any stretch of the imagination, it's quite likeable in its own way, but it simply lacks that extra little something to take it beyond watchable into the realms of being memorable.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for share!