Little Busters! - Episode 3

They may be one member closer to forming a full baseball team (and arguably one screwdriver short of a full toolkit, if you know what I mean), but there's still a long way to go until the Little Busters achieve their goal.

After the return of Naoe from his bout of narcolepsy (which really gets rather short shrift this week given how dramatically it was presented previously), the group start thinking about how and who is next on their hit list of potential team members.  While Kyousuke is on the look-out for a third year to join the group, this seems rather unlikely with entrance exams and the like coming up - so who could they get to join their merry band?

While this episode also introduces us to Haruka Saigusa, the real focus of the instalment is exactly the kind of girl that Kyousuke seems to be looking for - the bored genius who also happens to be a classmate of Naoe's, Kurugaya.  With a proclivity towards playing practical jokes and generally poking fun at other people, she certainly seems rather well suited to the Little Busters, even more so when she happily takes on Masato in one of the show's already well-established "fights with random objects", which she loses on a technicality (if kicking someone in the face counts as a technicality, anyhow).  It also seems that joining this makeshift baseball team is exactly what Kurugaya needs to satiate her boredom, meaning that by the end of the episode we have ourselves another team member.

All of this makes for another pretty fun episode of Little Busters - despite it being obvious what's coming from the outset, it's hard not to giggle at its silly goings-on and glean an overall sense of enjoyment from the whole thing, even if the setup is already threatening to become a little repetitive at this point.  Given my viewing of all of Key's previous works in adapted anime form, I'm curious to see where the series will head once we have the Little Busters completely assembled - at the moment though, that feels a little way off, but I'm willing to just sit back and enjoy the ride for now.