Kono Oto Tomare Review Episode 8

Odd Choices All Round

Kono Oto Tomare Episode 8

So Chika wasn’t going to play his grandfather’s koto for reasons, Takezou apparently is going to have to face his dark and scary past, and Hozuki is still the target of weirdos who for whatever reason feel that insulting the club she’s with is a good way to endear her to them. Kono Oto Tomare continues to have no clue how to build narrative tension without creating contrived and fairly childish premises and while each one might work by itself or even all together if handled with more deft, the end result here is an anime that looks pretty great but in reality is pretty average.

However, as with most episodes of this high school melodrama there are a few things it gets just right and this week I’ll hand it to the interactions between Chika and Hozuki. Whether it was early in the episode when he refused an invitation to eat lunch together before pushing her into the path of another student, a convenient way to get her to speak to someone else, or the end of the episode where they were bickering in the classroom, these two continue to have a great back-and-forth and their personalities are actually quite complementary.

While I’m throwing some praise in I may as well mention Hozuki’s performance this week, or at least the visualisation of her performance. The atmosphere of that moment came through loud and clear and that is something this series consistently gets right.

Where it goes a little side-ways is in the introduction of characters just to cause drama. The girl from the rival school who shows up is a caricature and not a character which makes it impossible to take any of her lines seriously. Even her motive is just really weird. Having heard Hozuki for years and now she decides to stride right in and stir things up. Honestly we already know Hozuki isn’t going anywhere.

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As to Takezou’s storyline, it didn’t get a lot of attention this episode but they seemed to be setting up some groundwork for him to finally get his emotional moment as Chika and Hozuki already have. Maybe it will pay off and maybe it won’t but I guess we’ll find out in future episodes.