Elegant Yokai Apartment Life Episodes 4 + 5: Too Much Guilt, Too Little Soul

Review Episode 4:

I do not get what the point of this is. He leaves the apartment when the student dorm is built but why? What does he gain? And given he regrets it from pretty much the first instant, why is it several months later at the end of the episode and he still hasn’t moved back? Even if we just focus on this from a plot point of view, it is obvious he has to move back or else the title of the anime makes zero sense (not that anime titles are known for always making sense). So isn’t this just a contrived filler plot to try to make us realise how happy he was at the apartment even though they haven’t really shown us enough interactions for us to get the sense that he was particularly happy there?

The other plot involving his classmate made even less sense. Why is he feeling a sense of personal guilt over that moron’s life choices?

All and all, this show remains strictly watch if you have spare time only and the protagonist is about as interesting as watching paint dry. Some of the other characters are more interesting but they aren’t getting a great deal of screen time.

Review Episode 5:

This show thinks it understands what makes these kind of slice of life, feel good, healing stories work and on paper it kind of does. What it does not understand is how to deliver it to the audience in a way that makes us care in the slightest about what is going on.

During episode 5, Inaba goes through 4 real encounters with characters we’ve met and each one gives him some profound insight into himself or humanity leading to the ultimate conclusion he should of course go back to the apartment. Wait… what was that? His roommate is a jerk to him leading him to tears when he meets up with ghost office worker because he can’t make friends with this one guy and this is supposed to make me think… I have no idea.

Ghost guy lays on some wisdom about humans and Inaba kind of agrees and reacts like something totally unthought of before has been revealed and then we catch up with the friend who had the punch up with him in episode 1 (I am yet to figure out how he is significant to Inaba or the story and the show does not seem interested in establishing any kind of connection other than he’s the guy Inaba was writing the letters to). He also has some fortune cookie wisdom to lay out there before we get the obligatory fist bump moment between two male friends in an anime and they part ways.

Lastly, we get a sobbing Eriko who is all upset because Inaba must have been sad when he lived with her family. Wait, this is how we’re going to reconcile the whole miserable home life from the start thing (which other than being told was uncomfortable, we never really knew why it was so bad)?

All of this leads to his return to the apartment where the residents throw a party because clearly he has such a sparkling personality and forged such a deep connection with them they’ve missed him dreadfully.

This show wants to gives us some feels but all I’m really feeling is underwhelmed.

Thanks for reading.

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