My hopes that DCII will live up to the dramatics of the original continue to wane as we reach the halfway point without any indication that the plot is progressing towards a dramatic climax. The relationships remain shallow and underdeveloped while the episodes are more filler material than anything. I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of you have dropped DCII by now. Personally, my misplaced hope and loyalty to the series is all that keeps me going, let’s hope there’s still some time to turn this around.

Episode Rating: 6/10

One day during breakfast, Yume tells Yoshiyuki that she’s invited Minatsu over for dinner again. Yume voices her concerns about Minatsu and how she hasn’t been getting along with the rest of the class very well, since Mizukoshi-sensei entrusted Minatsu to Yoshiyuki, Yume says that he should take responsibility to help her.

At school in between classes, Yoshiyuki is wondering what he should do about Minatsu, and just as he’s about to go do something about it, he’s surprised by Minatsu suddenly visiting his class. Apparently she’s become good friends with Anzu and the two discuss what seems to be plans that Minatsu has for global domination. But rather than that, Yoshiyuki wonders how they got to be such good friends, a secret which Anzu isn’t keen on revealing.

So after school, instead of going to band practice with Koko (you know, his girlfriend, the one he finally started making progress with last episode) he ditches her to stalk Minatsu. He follows her to a park where he sees her playing around with a dog. But when Yoshiyuki approaches her, saying this is the first time he’s seen her so cheerful and inviting her over for dinner, Minatsu gets angry and tells Yoshiyuki to mind his own business. The two get in a fight and the plans for dinner end up being canceled.

Naturally, this doesn’t go over well with Yume, who has already bought the ingredients for dinner and can’t believe Yoshiyuki screwed it up. She demands that he patch things up with Minatsu by tomorrow.

While this would normally be impossible, Yoshiyuki quite literally stumbles on the solution. While he walks to school worrying about how to make things up with Minatsu, she happens to be walking in the opposite direction, mindlessly reading over her plans to take over the world (NARF! lol) and the two bump into each other. Yoshiyuki picks up Minatsu’s global domination plans and it a quick scan before Minatsu snatches it away from him. Minatsu’s begs him not to tell anyone about it, so Yoshiyuki does what any upstanding member of society would in the situation, he blackmails her.

Yoshiyuki makes Minatsu accompany him for a pseudo date that evening, meaning that once again he ditches Koko and the band, leaving her to cover for Yoshiyuki. Nanaka in particular seems worried since she sees Yoshiyuki leaving the school with Minatsu, but can’t bring herself to say anything to Koko, who is loyally defending her boyfriend.

To start, Yoshiyuki brings Minatsu to a cafe, where she ends up more interested about his cellphone and its accompanying 1-seg technology (live TV streaming to portable devices). Seeing where her true passions lie, Yoshiyuki spends the rest of the day taking Minatsu to electronics stores showing her various technological advances mankind has made while she was asleep.

But when the two go to an arcade and Minatsu tries out a zombie virtual reality game, it proves to be too much for her to handle, as she ends up overheating and collapsing.

When she wakes up, Minatsu finds herself resting on Yoshiyuki’s lap, she tries to get up, only to find she hasn’t fully recovered yet. Minatsu asks him why he’s doing all this, what his purpose in spending time with her is. Yoshiyuki replies that there’s no particular reason, that he just wanted to get to know her better. She then asks him what she is to him, Yoshiyuki says that she’s a friend of course, saying that she’s no different than any human friend he has, as she expresses an equal amount of emotion.

Minatsu then takes him to a robot shop with a maid robot on display and tells him that he would never consider it a friend, yet it isn’t too different an existence from herself. Minatsu goes on to explain that she finds human treatment of robots despicable and hates how even her own existence is nothing but a predetermined algorithm of human manufacturing. As she starts to walk off, Yoshiyuki stops her and apologizes on behalf of humans for their treatment of robots. He knows that a single person’s apology means nothing, but still feels that Minatsu waking up to this world is not a waste and that it would be great if she learned more about the world and the people living in it. Minatsu seems content with the apology and she ends up coming over for dinner, just as planned.

And what a dinner it turns out to be, chock full of banana goodness, and Sakura even shows up to join them. Between Yume saying that Minatsu is an important friend to her and Sakura worrying about her at school, Minatsu comes to realize that maybe they’re not so bad after all and thinks that it might be alright for them to be friends.

Thoughts

Soooo…about Koko…

I mean, what the hell. An entire episode was spent finally pushing the development of the Koko/Yoshiyuki relationship to a point slightly past elementary hand holding and profuse blushing, only for Yoshiyuki to completely bail on the momentum and focus on Minatsu? It’s not like they’re doing this for drama prepping, if so they wouldn’t have used Minatsu, Yoshiyuki obviously isn’t going to end up with her, she’s an android. If this episode were reformed to center around Yume, that would make sense as it could be a nice buffer into a real rivalry, but instead we get a filler episode developing Minatsu, who by all rights should be a tertiary character.

But I suppose there’s no telling what DCII will do, it’s already surprised me by pouring the most time and development on arguably the two most minor characters. Koko, while still a main heroine, from what we’ve seen so far, has by far the most uninteresting route, and I would be REALLY surprised if Minatsu even has a dedicated route in the game.

And so my question is, why? Where are we going with all this? Are we going to ride out the stumbling relationship of KokoXYoshiyuki until the end, with the odd filler episode, like we have been doing so far? Because at this point I don’t even see how this can be turned into a believable character centric melodrama. Sure Yume is showing signs of interest in Yoshiyuki, but no more than she did at the beginning, I don’t see her pulling a Nemu and confessing to Yoshiyuki any time soon. Nor do I see Nanaka stepping up to the stage to betray her friend and steal Yoshiyuki away, even if she was interested, which I don’t think she is, more of a friendship vibe than anything.

The only way I see DCII making a complete 180 is by putting the good ol’ sakura tree to use. If it were to push the reset button and send us back to square one, then anything would be fair game and we could see all out rivalries. But besides being used in the first episode as the scene of Koko’s confession, there’s been no hint that the eternal sakura tree will play a part in this story at all.

*sigh* I guess I’ll stop the ranting here, the more I write about it, the more I come to realize that it’s going to take a miracle from the anime gods to turn this subpar harem into the drama filled DC successor that I so longed for.

But hey! Who knows, said miracle may be on its way and my worries may be for nothing, so for now I shall cling desperately onto that faint possibility and await next week’s episode.

Needs moar Nanaka

~ Shirukii ~