Amagami SS - Episode 9

Now that Tachibana has had his wicked way with the back of Haruka's knee and Kaoru's belly button, it's time for another new story arc within Amagami SS, now complete with added narrator and fourth wall breakage as a result. Well, I guess if it's good enough for Ookami-san...

Anyhow, this latest arc begins with Tachibana spotting a girl in a school uniform other than his own establishments... or rather, he spots her chest - he is a teenager after all. When he loses his coin purse in a collision with Haruka (that girl just won't go away, will she?), it's this new girl who picks it up and shyly returns it to him before running from his further questioning.


Luckily for him, the girl is a new-found friend of his sister after transferring to their school, and thus he finally gets to introduce himself to her properly and find out her name; that being Sae Nakata. Thanks to a chance meeting involving a "scary" dog, Tachibana and Nakata end up sitting down at a nearby restaurant for a coffee, and when Sae mentions a desire to work part-time (largely on account of the cute uniforms sported at Kaoru's establishment), Tachibana takes it upon himself to help her find out about the job, and later train her up for the task. Needless to say, such training doesn't exactly go very well with comical consequences, as it appears that the insipid Sae even struggles with normal every day tasks such as breathing and putting one foot in front of the other.

If you haven't just noticed from that last sentence, I don't like Sae Nakata. At all. In fact, she's probably my most hated anime character stereotype, the two-dimensional female equivalent of fingernails on a chalk board. So, her introduction isn't exactly a good start to this story arc. Even attempting to put these feelings to one side for a moment, I can't find anything to like about this episode - Amigami SS' attempt at deploying a narrator is also incredibly annoying and unimaginative (if they really did steal the idea from Ookami-san then they obviously weren't paying much attention to why it succeeds within that series), and while Tachibana is pretty much an okay guy in this episode he hardly stands out from the crowd himself.

Overall, I get the feeling I'm not going to enjoy this story arc very much....