Oreimo 2 Episode 14
What They Say:
Kyosuke Kosaka, a normal 17-year-old high school student living in Chiba, has not gotten along with his younger sister Kirino in years. For longer than he can remember, Kirino has ignored his comings and goings and looked at him with spurning eyes. It seemed as if the relationship between Kyōsuke and his sister, now fourteen, would continue this way forever. One day however, Kyosuke finds a DVD case of a magical girl anime which had fallen in his house’s entrance way.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With a bit of a break between the end of the TV season and the OVAs, it’s actually pretty welcome to get back to the world of Oreimo. Getting the OVAs streamed mostly worldwide is also a big plus, even if it is just for a two week window. That’s far more than most shows would ever do sine the whole point is to generate rental and purchasable releases rather than just streams, so there’s definitely a lot of appreciation out there to get the final three episodes of the show that were made for this format only. And that it follows up the events of the show as we last saw it pretty closely definitely works nicely as well since Kyosuke has been through a whole lot in the latter half of the season, especially with what Kirino started throwing at him in so many different ways.
The season had done well by Kuroneko fans as we saw a good couple of episodes with the two of them in a relationship of sorts which lasted a couple of months, or at least felt like it, and we get some mild recap of it here at the start with a pained Kyosuke racing towards the location where he has to make a choice of some sort with the women in his life. Though Kuroneko is a fairly standard archetype kind of character, she’s been very fun to watch as he helps her out of her shell, but an arc where she also forces herself out in order to experience more of life as she wanted to. With him unable to really make the right kind of confession to her, as much as he wants to, it’s not in the cards because of how the original work is written, and that forces Kuroneko into freeing Kyosuke from everything, from her own script as well. She gets some solidly emotional material here as she’s been a puppet in all of this and is very self aware of what happened, making it all the more painful to watch as she sees what she wants slip away from her.
Unfortunately, while we know Kyosuke deals with this in some form, it’s glossed over for the most part and it’s back to normal life for him which involves him doing things with and for Kirino again and her need for her 18+ games. That leads to some comical encounters at the game store as they get their Christmas themed game and get everything all set up for it since Kirino is just so completely into setting the right mood for it. And you do feel bad for what Kirino puts him through and her whiny nature overall as the story goes on, which continues to make her a difficult character to like a lot of the time.
Which of course makes it all the harder when Kyosuke tries to confess to her on some level, though it’s hard to say how far he’ll go at first, and she just bolts from him and leads him on a merry chase that brings in the others. It just gets harder and harder to understand his interest in her and what he really wants out of it considering how she is. There is fun in the chase though, creepy as it gets at times, and especially when you get Kuroneko helping out. When he’s forced into the confession, you do have to laugh at it since it’s not entirely of his own volition and others are forcing his head, which just completely freaks Kirino out. I did like how Kyosuke became more confident at that point with his feelings, awkward as they are, but it’s something that he runs with and has no regrets about.
In Summary:
The good is that we get to see these OVAs streamed and don’t have to wait for the eventual home video release. The bad is that we have to see what happens to Kuroneko and the approach she takes in dealing with her situation. The first half is frustrating with this, and especially Kyosuke’s reaction, but it’s just part of the pain of the episode. Seeing how he deals with things in the second half, and how others help him to make his confession, still makes me simply feel weird about the whole thing. It’s an amusing gag for awhile but has largely been overplayed, which is why so many people flocked to Kuroneko or Ayase as his ideal partner for at least his high school life. Going through with events with Kirino her and his confession is certainly interesting to see in general, but it has me leery about what will come next.
Grade: B
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.