Wednesday 23 October 2013

White Album 2 - Episode 3

The mystery pianist has been revealed, and it's none other than the girl who sits right next to Haruki in class!

Indeed, perhaps more notable here is that the girl in question, Kazusa Touma, is in fact a long-standing friend of Haruki's - or perhaps we should say was a long-standing friend, as they don't really talk much these days.  Despite being the girl who taught him to play guitar in the first place however, Touma isn't slow in stating that she has absolutely no desire whatsoever to play alongside Haruki in the light music club; not that he seems capable of taking no for an answer.


Enter Ogiso into the fray, who seems to have picked up the same sense of determination somewhere along the line as she begins her own campaign to convince Kazusa, taking her out for a drink to try and figure out her reluctance to join the club, then inviting both Touma and Kitahara to a home-cooked meal at her house in the hope of them talking things out and coming to an agreement.  When Setsuna's family, and her father in particular, become involved in their daughter's desire to join the club we soon get to see why she's so keen to make some friends and do something different, and it's this above all else that proves to be the key to changing Touma's mind...

Now that we have all three of our main characters established, it certainly doesn't look like White Album 2 is going to blaze any new trails by any stretch of the imagination - still, it's pleasant to look at and pleasant to watch for the most part even when some of its humorous moments miss by a country mile, ensuring that it keeps its place as an unremarkable piece of inoffensive entertainment.  I realise this is damning with faint praise, and that is perhaps the point - while its predecessor at least had an interesting era and ideas to work with, this is a decidedly run-of-the-mill visual novel adaptation that shows no signs of breaking out of those shackles.

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