Monday 29 October 2012

Little Busters! - Episode 4

After introducing us to another new character, Finnish transfer student with a poor grasp of English named Kud, at the start of this episode... the rest of this week's Little Busters has absolutely nothing to do with her.

Instead, our focus returns to Komari Kamikita - while heading to the rooftop to hand over a reward to be given to Komari by Rin to thank her for helping out an injured cat, Naoe overhears Komari talking about her big brother in her dreams.  What's unusual here is that Komari is an only child with no such brother, despite having a recurring dream about him reading a book, the exact contents of which she can't remember, to her when she was younger.


Prompted to search for the book she remembers as a result of discussing this dream, Komari stumbles across some shocking information - not the contents of the book itself (a quite literal chicken and egg story) but rather the fact that it's signed by one Takuya Kamikita.  Does Komari really have a brother that she's simply forgotten about?  Any thoughts of this are placed to one side as Komari spends her Sunday helping out at an old people's home with the assistance of the other Little Busters assembled so far, but when Naoe refuses to take no for an answer when it comes to helping one belligerent old man who is a patient at the hospital, he might just have stumbled onto something very relevant regarding Komari's family.

Having expected Little Busters to continue to build up its cast judging this week's episode by its opening scenes, it now seems that we're going to enter what you could call the first "proper" arc of the series - and it certainly feels like pretty typical KEY stuff given its layout and obvious eye for human melodrama.  Not that this is a bad thing, mind you - these guys know how to pull on someone's heartstrings - but at the moment it'll have to do a little more than it's succeeded with from this episode, which turned out to be a slightly tepid and decidedly by the numbers affair aside from a couple of sparkling moments of comedy.  It would be unfair to dismiss this particular plot arc straight away, but it isn't the most compelling of beginnings for this aspect of the show's story.

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