And what happened, then? Well, they say – that Futaro’s small heart shrank three sizes that day.

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

With the hurt of the midterms still fresh, Futaro is determined to get the girls studying more!…but is once again halted from overeating Miku’s attempts at croquettes, all because the also present Yotsuba couldn’t just lie and say they were fine from the start. While she goes to get medicine, Nino and Itsuki try to head out, but Futaro asks Yotsuba to lie in order to get them to stay. So, she says that he actually has a horrible illness that they need to help treat! When THAT inevitably falls apart, Yotsuba sulks that she hasn’t changed at all, but Futaro tells her that she was actually the first to change. When she asks why he thinks she’s always helping him out, he guesses good grades, but she responds…that she likes him.

Then immediately tells him it was a lie. Damn, that’s cold.

Later on, anticipation builds for the upcoming school camping trip, including the legend that those who dance at the bonfire will end up together forever, though Futaro’s been stuck with planning the “test of courage” (basically a haunted house but in the woods). And with some blackmailing from Ichika, he also gets all of the sisters’ contact info…except for Nino, who he gives his notebook to write on and then forgets to get it from her. He also follows Yotsuba to her turning down joining the Basketball team because she really doesn’t want to let him down. Then he gets his book back from Nino but drops it open to a picture he keeps of his former badboy self, who Nino becomes smitten with, so Futaro tells her it’s a relative.

Little does he know that the girl also in the photo is one of the sisters from before they started dressing differently.

OUR TAKE

Okay, first thing I should probably talk about is the introduction of the photo and how it impacts the plot. I’m not as familiar with these sort of harem shows as I used to be, but I’ve become aware that “old childhood friend photo” and then running into that friend who becomes your love interest is apparently a pretty big cliché and is oddly familiar to a recently ended series called Nisekoi, which included a similar element. The big contention with this sort of thing is that it basically tells you who’s going to win the guy ahead of time and deflates the tension of all the other options because it’s set in stone when it ideally should be about how the characters’ bonds grow and change in the present. Although one could argue that things are kinda set in stone already due to genre convention, which is why it probably means that the girl is Itsuki, and that she’s destined to take home the Futaro gold.

But dammit, as an Ichika fan, I am determined to keep hope alive!

But yeah, other than that, this episode didn’t really feel like a whole story, mainly set up for the next few that will round out the season. There are certainly signs of development among the characters since the show started, as Yotsuba points out, so I guess this could serve as sort of a checkpoint for that, but it’s hard to judge it as its own segment of a whole. There’s kind of a whole episode about Yotsuba not being able to lie well that ends half way through, but then it’s right into camp setup.

This also wasn’t the best looking episode of late either. The animation has already been pretty choppy, but I’ve been willing to let that slide. This time, however, there was just too much that stuck out for me to ignore, namely Futaro’s color changing wig (that seems almost designed to telegraph exactly how it’s going to be used later) and Yotsuba’s apology to the basketball team that includes a long panning shot of her ass. Guys, they’re already cute and have fun personalities! You don’t need to try so hard to get me to like these characters!

I guess one of these had to be less good than the rest and the only way to do that was to basically make it barely an episode at all. Next time sees the beginning of the big school trip that will take us to the end of the season, so at least this problem likely won’t happen again.

Score 6/10