Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu - Purezza - Episode 3

With Christmas approaching, it seems that Haruka has decided that she wants to get a part-time job so that she can save up and buy Yuuto a Christmas present out of her own hard-earned cash. Not a bad idea at all that, and in the spirit of blatantly stealing your almost-girlfriend's ideas, Yuuto decides to do exactly the same. So it goes that our hapless hero ends up working for a while as the live-in butler of Rie Kugimiya.


Okay, so he isn't literally the butler for Rie Kugimiya, but rather one Touka Tennouji, the daughter of a rich family. Needless to say given the voice actress in question, Touka is a tsundere extraordinaire, ordering Yuuto around to her heart's content before being shocked by his genuine human compassion, something that she's never experienced before in her short life of being waited on hand and foot by staff who are only in it for the money.

While all of this is good and well as far as an episodic plot goes for a show like this one, in reality Touka's only purpose in this episode (aside from filling the obligatory tsundere archtype) is to show her panties as often as humanly possible. In fact, it's actually probably unfair to even level the accusation of her "showing" them at the character, as most of the glimpses we get of them are because, if this were a live-action production, the cameras would have been operated by Munchkins with dwarfism. Serioualy guys, if you're going for some kind of fan service record, at least be a little imaginative with how you get those shots into your episode.

While Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu has always had a slight element of the risque and fan service about it, I don't think there can be any doubt that it's gone into overdrive with Purezza, and to be honest it almost entirely ruins a lot of what was enjoyable about the original series - The Haruka-Yuuto dynamic was always more sweet and entertaining than anything the other aspects of the series had to offer, and now that Haruka's importance has been overtaken largely by underwear there really isn't all that much left to entertain us. I hate to be some kind of fan service killjoy or panty prude, but there's only so much a guy can take before it becomes eye-rollingly predictable, and sadly this episode of Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu - Purezza has fallen into exactly that trap.