WARNING: Don’t read this review before you’ve watched the episode, unless you want to badly spoil yourself.

Short Summary:
A girl selling newspaper subscriptions arrives at Yamato’s door, promising free tickets to an amusement park. Yamato jumps at the chance, thinking that he can take Suzuka on a date. Unfortunately, the perfect opportunity to invite her never presents itself. Instead, the tickets are accidentally shredded by the cat. Yamato is devastated, but Suzuka ends up inviting him with her pair of tickets that she also got from the newspaper girl.
The next day, on their day off, the two go to the amusement park despite the fact that it is raining. Suzuka complains the entire time, which gets Yamato quite frustrated. After the first roller coaster though, her attitude changes for the better and they spend the rest of the day together. That night, after the rain stops and while watching the night parade, Yamato works up the courage to confess to Suzuka. At first she doesn’t take him seriously, but when he says that he’s not joking, she apologetically rejects him. The walk home is silent and awkward. Arriving home, Yamato complains about Suzuka to Yasunobu, who is there reading the newspaper. Though Yamato never mentions the confession, Yasunobu catches on quickly and leaves, tossing Yamato a packet of tissues first. Yamato says he doesn’t need them, but starts crying.

Mentar convinced me to delay this post until Lunar put out the episode so that people could experience the full effect of this episode without it being spoiled by me blogging it. Hopefully Suzuka’s rejection of Yamato surprised you (meaning Mentar accomplished his task).
While the confession and subsequent rejection might have come as a surprise, I think it makes sense in the overall plot. Suzuka was right in saying that they had not known each other for long enough, plus she’s carrying a lot of extra baggage which has been hinted at and will be covered later. And if Suzuka accepted the confession, then we wouldn’t really have an interesting story anymore.
The actual production level of this episode rises several notches from previous episodes. The animation seems a bit more consistant and I really enjoyed the actual music during the dramatic parts. It could have been a bit more soft, especially during the final scene, but I’ll take what I can get.
From here, Yamato is going to have to recover and, according to the preview, renew his efforts to get close to Suzuka by joining the track team. Hopefully the next few episodes won’t lose the quality of this one.

5 Comments

  1. Well, I do think that this episode is more enjoyable to watch while you do NOT know what’s gonna happen – though the episode title, “Confession”, already sets the tone.

    What I want to point out is that the confession wasn’t out of the blue. Holding hands does mean something in Japan, especially since right before the confession Suzuka notices them holding hands, and accepts it with a smile. Also, when she realizes that the confession is real, she doesn’t just apologetically turn Yamato down, she spends a long half minute to consider it. When she rejects Yamato, she does it in a very gentle way and obviously tries to comfort him for the rest of the day, very unlike she has been before. And finally (I’m a bit surprised that you didn’t make a screenshot of it), she’s hugging her frog-teddy tight with a very upset, almost frightened look in her eyes when she’s back in her apartment.

    In a nutshell, this is the first episode in which I was fully satisfied with the execution. The real story begins now 🙂

    Mentar
  2. Question: Unless I’m mistaken (and the torrent has sence disapeared and no longer exists in reality) Lunar hasn’t released a sub yet, so why did you still release this early?

    Overall I enjoyed the episode and I’m wondering how things pick up from here, although it was somewhat obvious that Suzuka somewhat regrets rejecting him.

    Anza

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