Nyan Koi! - Episode 5

After spending a few episodes building up its harem, I suppose it's about time for Nyan Koi to let it loose almost in its entirety come episode five... and what better way to do that than at a theme park?!

Thankfully, this episode does at least break somewhat with harem anime conventions pretty earlier on, with Junpei flat-out rejecting Nagi's advances, which in turn sees her turn her attentions to setting him up with Kaede to the best of her abilities. Surprisingly (and again messing with harem convention slightly) she actually does a half-decent job, telling Mizuno how Junpei really feels and ensuring that Kanako is kept largely out of harm's way so that the two love birds can spend some quality time together. Of course, this doesn't go entirely to plan, but progress is most definitely made... that is, until yet another random girl turns up out of the blue and confronts Junpei towards the end of the episode. Not more girls for the harem, surely?! Who am I kidding, of course that's what they've appeared for!


As this episode was lacking some of the lightning-fast pacing and gags of the last instalment, Nyan Koi's fifth outing chose largely to play on the adorable nature of Kaede Mizuno, with some degree of success - How can you not like this girl? Oddly enough, cheerleading for her as Junpei's future girlfriend made this quite an enjoyable episode for all of its run of the mill romance and theme park-centric activity, although I can see myself tiring of the show if they keep adding in more and more characters to try and set a cat amongst the pigeons (do you see what I did there?). As of right now however, Nyan Koi remains in the "enjoyable fluff" pile for this season, and in an autumn where there isn't much else going on that actually makes it quite a treasure in relative terms I suppose.