Masamune-kun's Revenge

Episode 7

Despite getting regular snippets of Makabe's internal monologue and the thoughts of other characters, this series plays sly with revealing anything substantial about its underlying truths, and episode 7 is no exception to that. Despite getting very little attention in this episode, one brief scene reveals that Neko is up to something at least as unwholesome as what Makabe is plotting. A flashback for Aki's father's secretary, who gets introduced in this episode, further suggests that something is seriously amiss about Makabe's understanding of the “Pig's Foot” incident that put him on the path to self-improvement and revenge. The signs are starting to show that Aki's disdain for suitors might also be connected to that incident, and perhaps even she has a false understanding of what really happened then. Of course, this raises the possibility that someone was deliberately screwing with both of them, and perhaps Neko was a casualty of that too. My money is on either Yoshino or her elder sister turning out to be the mastermind. Whatever the truth is, we won't get the full details until Makabe and Aki actually address that day directly, and that doesn't seem to be happening anytime soon.

Instead, this is the obligatory beach episode, since you can't have this many hot girls hanging around in an anime without one of these coming up eventually. There's even a sexy newcomer in the form of Midori Yuisaki, the secretary of Aki's father who seems to have plenty of trouble staying in stable relationships and doesn't take well to Makabe insisting that he's Aki's boyfriend upon their first meeting. Her attempts to drive them apart by scaring the bejeezus out of Makabe during a Test of Courage go just as awry as her past relationships, since she's unaware that Makabe was already engineering the experience to suit his own ends. That doesn't make her too convincing as a capable secretary for Aki's father, but that's what happens when you try to shoehorn a character like this into a story that doesn't have a comfortable place for her. (She would have been much more convincing as an ex-wife.) Still, she serves her purpose adequately, and the way that the Test of Courage utterly falls apart on her is rather funny.

All of the emphasis on Midori limits the time to concentrate on Makabe and the main ladies in the second half of the episode, which limits the forward movement of the story. What does exist is entertaining enough, I suppose, as we get the mild fanservice of girls in bikinis, and Kojuro's shtick about being mistaken for a girl hasn't gotten too old yet. The series is nowhere near the same league as the better comedies of this season for laughs (I'd even put the mild humor of Interviews with Monster Girls ahead of it), and Makabe just isn't that appreciable as a male lead either (if you want to see a narcissistic male lead done well, watch Amagi Brilliant Park), but at least the potential story angles are still keeping the series afloat.

Rating: B-

Masamune-kun's Revenge is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.