Harukana Receive – 08

「約束守ってみせるから」 (Yakusoku Mamottemiserukara)
“I’ll Keep Our Promise”

This week’s episode was exactly what I’ve been waiting for.

General Impressions

After building things up to this point, I can happily say that this might have been my favorite episode thus far. With a combination of great story beats and a ton of fun characterization moments, this week’s episode was the payoff I think a lot of have been waiting for.

Starting off with the biggest point of this week’s episode, I hope I wasn’t the only one who got a little emotional with Kanata confronting her fears and finally getting the courage to literally yell out her feelings to Narumi. Especially since every step along the way I had this nagging feeling that it shouldn’t work. But lo and behold, from the moment that Haruka picked up her phone to Narumi throwing up the slickest pinky finger promise I’ve ever seen, I could feel all sorts of emotions swelling up inside of my chest. The most prominent of which was a feeling of happiness that Harukana Receive was able to take everything it’s built up thus far and turn it into something that rewarded everyone who’s stuck with it up to this point. That and as silly as Kanata can be, I love her existence as a character and will take any opportunity for the story to give her some real moments to truly show just how compassionate she is.

Backing things up a bit, I really enjoyed getting to see Haruka and Kanata become even closer as a pair when it comes to playing on the field. With the timeline to improve quickly shortening as we inch closer to the end of the season, I think the story’s execution of today’s training session worked a lot better than previous attempts. What probably helped the most after shortening everything may have been Marissa’s ability to highlight how important the bond between a pair is are how that is Haruka’s biggest skill.

Overall, I thought this week’s episode was pretty good compared to what we’ve seen in the past few weeks. With short time skips being added in to help alleviate the obvious fact that Haruka and Kanata need time to become better players and the story touching on all the previous points it brought up in the past, it really feels like we’ve hit a point where we can move into new territory when it comes to storytelling. And based off of the last line of the episode, it sounds like we’re getting another short time skip to summer where I’m sure we’ll see vast improvements among all of our key players.

In any case, I’ll see you guys then where we’ll see just how much time has passed and whether or not Akari will have a dedicated partner to play with. See you then!