Kokoro Connect - Episode 11

The problems just keep on coming for Kokoro Connect's quintet of friends - no sooner are their troubles with having their desires unleashed at random put to bed do they find themselves with a new and arguably even more bizarre problem to contend with.

This time around, the group are faced with this simple but troublesome scenario - every day between midday and 5PM, some members of the group (Taichi excluded) will revert to some kind of state of childhood.  The group discover this courtesy of the first victims of the "experiment", Iori and Yui, but as the episode progresses both Inaba and Aoki also get to experience some brief slices of time as their childhood selves.

Perhaps more troubling in the midst of all this is that it doesn't seem to be Heartseed pulling the strings - or rather, it is Heartseed, but not the same one responsible for pulling the previous stunts suffered by the group.  Although Taichi learns all of this, he's strictly forbidden to tell anyone else, thus exacerbating his problems.  That aside, you might assume that reverting to a child-like state for a few hours would be no big deal, but for this particular group of students it's a real problem - all of them have memories from their youth of some shape or form that they've either forgotten with good reason or simply have no need to recall, and with the reversion to childhood also bringing the memories of that time flooding back with it, it seems that all and sundry have some new struggles to face over the coming episodes.

Although the way this latest story arc was initially presented made it seem as though it might have ended up as frivolous fare, this week's Kokoro Connect has quickly established that this won't be the case - exactly how far it can go with its new premise remains to be seen, but it certainly seems confident that it can wring the requisite amount of drama and turmoil out of events to make it worthwhile.  Given what has gone before, I have a certain amount of trust in the series that it can deliver upon its promises, so hopefully it can succeed in doing exactly that moving forward.