After a little character building drama with our announcers, it’s time for more Tsundere antics.
This episode, we actually get some background on Endo and Kobayashi (particularly Endo or the two together) and… it’s fairly decent. Endo, it turns out, used to play baseball, but injured his shoulder and became unable to pitch. This was a huge deal for him, because baseball was kind of his life. Later, when the class was trying to draft him into other sports teams (not knowing about his injury, which he didn’t seem to want to speak up about), Kobayashi covered for him by poaching him into the Broadcast club, which she did because she liked his voice and thought he’d be a good match for it.
This event is clearly the start of Endo’s affection for Kobayashi, since he feels like she saved him from a dead end of his own. Recalling this translates to not wanting to let the game characters (people in the other world) die either. They’ve only got one chance, as Kobayashi has confirmed that she can’t load the save if they’re alone, copy it, or revert to any previous version.
At first, it seems like things are working out. Despite a misunderstanding or two, Fiene and Lieselotte are bonding, her cousin is making the moves like it’s his route as the main love interest, and she’s close enough to Seig that they’re being considered a cute couple, which is exactly what she clearly does want.
However, dark forces are still moving, and we get a scene where Lise starts to fall under the mental influence of the Witch of Yore, convincing herself that she’s not worthy of Seig and that he wouldn’t give her the time of day if he wasn’t obligated to do so – something that might be true in the canon route where he doesn’t have god-given insight into what her behavior really means, and that clearly remains a deep-seated fear here, meaning that our leads still have something of an uphill battle to attempt to change fate.
At the end of the episode, we once again check in with the weird guy who seems to know a thing or two about the magical nature of MagiKoi, and find him frustrated that he’s not triggering real interactions with their world. It’s still unclear how the show is going to use him or when, but it wants us to remember he exists.
On the whole, I think this episode was pretty good for including a few more dramatic moments. Endo’s backstory came on a little heavy with fairly little setup, but sometimes you do just need to tell, and that level of important event explains why the rest of the club really wanted to ship the two of them. The scenes with Fiene and Lise’s cousin or Lise falling prey to her own fears were also pretty good from a dramatic side of things, while the comedy stayed the course when Seig was on screen. This means I’m still… reasonably pleased with this show. I don’t necessarily love it, but I do like it, and I think it could go somewhere really good depending on how they use what they’ve been setting up.