Rolling Review – Houkago Saikoro Club (02)

All warfare is based on deception.

Episode Synopsis:

A new day brings our characters back to school, where they debate how familiarly to address each other after bonding over a board game. A boy in their class, Shouta Tanoue, who has been subtly trying to get closer to Aya, encounters the girls after school and is pulled into a desktop card game. In a game about bluffing, both he and Aya are easy prey for Miki and Midori. Afterwards, Aya inadvertently reveals to Shouta and Miki that her inability to read people extends beyond the table, as she assumes that he’s interested in Midori, with whom he’s shared classes for their entire lives.

Review:

I have to say: I was not expecting this level of advertainment in an anime, or at least this flavor. This exact box –

– is available on Amazon as an import, and I’m sorely tempted to pick it up for the novelty, since the cards themselves don’t actually have any text on them. Well, unless you count the stripe of copyright information on the long edge of one of the fly cards, which actually isn’t in Japanese, and is almost completely legible as the anime pans over it:

Like, who does this? At this point, I’m more interested in learning how these shots were composited than following the characters – which isn’t to say that they’re completely uninteresting, but we are moving a little slowly. It’s kind of a run-of-the-mill, low-stakes dramedy for the time being, which does make for a relaxing slice-of-life, and I am curious to see how the character interactions are re-framed as the group composition changes and as they play different games.

Side note: he didn’t appear in this episode, but I want to believe that the store manager –

– is somehow related to the yosakoi store manager from HaNaYaMaTa

Drop us a line if you’ve seen these guys anywhere else ~

Summary:

I am paying to watch this infomercial, and it’s worth it so far.

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