Random Expected, typical chibi!

Sporting uninspired plot devices, recycled jokes and noticeably lazy animation, the third installment of YoakeYori is the most unimpressive thus far. The episode starts off with an interesting premise, Tatsuya heads out early Sunday morning to work, leaving Feena confused about the meaning of a ‘job’. Curiosity in tow, she follows Tatsuya and watches as he goes about his daily routine at the restaurant.

Carrying obvious ulterior motives, Jin asks the curious Feena if she’d like to give working at the restaurant a trial run. Feena jumps at the proposition and ends up doing a flawless job at waitressing, much to the disappointment of Jin who was expecting horrible failure and the need for comforting afterwards.

Cutting his losses, Jin suggests Feena try her hand at cooking, and if Yakitake Japan! has taught us anything, the best way to hone cooking skills is to in contest form! The challenger? Master Carbon herself, Natsuki. Some pre-competition complications arise with the buying of ingredients at the same place and etc etc, nothing too interesting happens though.

Onto the actual competition, a blatant rip-off of Iron Chef, which I’ll assume was intentional…but not funny in the least. Feena continues her streak of perfection, beating out the competition (who manages to burn everything from salad to soup to cake) in every category.

However, Natsuki’s terrible cooking gets her some sympathy points from Tatsuya, who happily eats her charcoal-like food with a smile and words of encouragement. Feena shows her very first flaw, slight jealousy. And so in a desperate grasp for attention, Feena mimics Natsuki and burns next morning’s breakfast. Of course this works perfectly as she is treated to the same sympathetic and loving treatment Natsuki received the night prior.

Thoughts

Bah, despite my relative praise for the previous two episodes, I really can’t find any redeeming qualities in this one. The comedy was just plain uninspired, drawing off cliches from other animes (Yakitake style Iron Chef match up) and even recycling its own jokes several times (Natsuki paddle).

The base idea of having Feena work at the restaurant seemed like it was going in the right direction. I was thinking of something more along the lines of Jin’s fantasy, wherein Feena royally screws up everything she does and comes running to Tatsuya for help. But instead we saw her perfect ‘ojou-sama’ type personality bloom even further, and while there’s nothing wrong with this per se, it’s just unentertaining to watch such a perfect being float around.

The cooking contest was doomed to fail the moment it started imitating Iron Chef. I would have rather seen some struggling in Feena’s cooking prowess which could have led to a nice “Feena learns to cook” montage…but no, a few hours with a knife and a chopping board and she’s an expert.

After reading the nuances about animation on the previous episode I had decided not to judge the quality of the show based on its animation rather than its content…but come on, wth happened here. There were so many animation shortcuts it was difficult to watch. The inherent flaws in character design and detail stuck around from the previous episode, but further deteriorated by a blatant overuse of chibi scenes. I still maintain that content is far more important than animation, but when both are lacking, they do doubly the harm on one another.

We did get to see slight character and plot development between the Tatsuya-Natsuki-Feena triangle, but it was childish jealousy that ended up being the driving factor at the end. However, it in no way justifies the 20 minutes of filler that was endured beforehand.

Hopefully the next episode redeems this series and it becomes watchable again, because I’m not going to sit through another 9 filler episodes along these lines.

Old’d

69 episodes of Yakitake renders this parody utterly useless =(

~ Shirukii ~