Thursday 1 November 2012

Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai! - Episode 5

If there's one problem with life outside of Rikka's Otherworld, it's the intricacies of its numerical system - unfortunately for her, such problems hold no weight with her maths teacher, who is demanding a marked improvement come exam time lest she be made to quit her after-school circle.

So begins a pretty run of the mill "help one member of the group study to avoid exam apocalypse" episode of Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai, exacerbated only by how difficult it is to get Rikka to actually sit down and learn anything when her head is filled with delusional thoughts.  Luckily for her, she has a plan - to help out the teachers and school in general in the hope that this will assuage any anger when she fails her maths exam.


When even this plan goes horribly awry, and indeed makes things worse, there's nothing for it but to knuckle down and study - luckily for her, Yuuta is beginning to fathom a little more about what makes Rikka tick, leaving him with plenty of avenues to explore when it comes to coaxing/bribing her into studying properly in the name of ensuring that the Far Eastern Magic Nap Society of Summer can continue.  Incidentally, it's also a goal which seems to bring Rikka and Yuuta a little closer together...

As I've basically already mentioned, this was a decidedly run of the mill episode even by this show's standards - a few amusing moments aside, and with some deference to the sweet, soft emotional underbelly of the episode, it was more or less the kind of thing we've seen done a thousand times before, albeit with a little more visual panache on this occasion.  In fact, this instalment could probably be used as another argument in my suggestion that Kyoto Animation should be working on something better than this; visuals aside this is the kind of series that a whole number of studios could have produced competently, and although Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai isn't bad it's hardly the stuff of legend, while failing to even hit the comedy quotient shown by the likes of K-ON.  If last week's episode was the one which almost won me over regarding this show, this week has merely reminded me that it isn't particularly noteworthy at its core.

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