Little Busters! Refrain - Episode 8

Trying to recreate the Little Busters from their recent adventures as a baseball team have proved fruitless, but that isn't the end of the matter for Riki, as he sets his sights on going back even further into the group's history to effectively recreate it from the very start.

After quizzing Rin on how Kyousuke started the Little Busters, he learns that his first target is to be Masato, although directly approaching him and asking him to join the gang really doesn't go well at all, with Masato asserting that all he wants to do is to be the strongest while warning both Riki and Rin to stay well away.  This is no idle warning either, as it soon comes to light that Masato is wandering the school randomly punching people's lights out for what seems to be no reason whatsoever.

As a result, Riki takes another leaf out of Kyousuke's book, devising a trap to ensnare Masato so that he can talk to him and win him over.  Even this is reckoning without the full strength of Masato, as he overcomes attempt after attempt to slow him down, leaving Naoe with nothing for it but to abandon using his brains and resort to brawn to get his way.  For his part, it seems that Masato has entered some kind of hallucinogenic state that causes him to see everybody as a copy of himself, because.... oh, I'll be damned if I know, does anything that Little Busters adds to its narrative make sense any more?

I can certain appreciate what Refrain is trying to do at this point, but yet again its clumsy handling of its ideas seem likely to hole it under the surface - I'm all for some mystery and touches of the supernatural as per other Key works, but on this occasional subtle touches along those lines have been replaced with a sledgehammer to beat the plot into submission whenever the story requires it.  I keep on hoping that everything will be explained at some point, but there's now so much material in the "stuff that needs to be explained" inbox that it's going to need a full-time staff to keep track of it, again fueling my suspicions that aspects of the story are just making things up as they go along - there's a big difference between not holding the viewer's hand to leave them to figure things out and simply making no sense, and Little Busters is veering dangerously close to the latter right now.