“Spartan Kick Combo! Acid Storm! Dragon Somersault! Shining Wizard! What the hell?!”

Summary

After accidentally lending Saigusa Haruka his “dangerous” idiom dictionary, Riki runs into Kurugaya Yuiko, a member of his class who achieves perfect grades and never turns up to lessons. When she intervenes in one of Masato and Kengo’s fights and offers to brawl it out with Masato, she easily proves her superior abilities over Muscles and later decides to join the Little Busters as well, believing it to be a lot of fun she’s had in a while.

Impression

This week we pretty much left behind any form of dark foreshadowing other than a short shout-out to narcolepsy at the start, and went back to the bright slice of life that Little Busters! still manages to make really entertaining. Of course this serves as a good opportunity to introduce more characters (think back to how many different girls ended up being in the OP) and one of them that was given an intro this week was Saigusa Haruka, who was the unfortunate victim of Masato’s…eccentricities. Seriously, who keeps an idiom dictionary among pudding and other types of food? Going back a step, who even keeps food in their school desk drawer for long periods of time? Well…anything’s possible for Muscles I guess, who already isn’t the sharpest tack in the drawer. It’d have been glaringly obvious for anyone that something’s fishy (literally) if you return something you borrowed in a plastic bag. Anyway, Haruka will probably forgive him. She looks too happy a person to hold grudges and all that whatnot.

This week’s character spotlight fell on Kurugaya Yuiko, someone I thought to be slightly weird at the start (probably an entry requirement for the Little Busters) but quickly turned out to be the cool beauty onee-chan type, which I actually love more than Komari’s moeblob traits. Like Komari did, Kurugaya took an interest in Riki to start off with, probably thinking he was an interesting person – though how she realized that I have no idea, given that she never turns up to class. Must be nice to be hot, athletic as well as get straight perfect grades to the point that you don’t have to show up to class and can still have enough credit to pass. Kurugaya’s most likely a possible route in the VN, and if she is I can already see the kind of flags and encounters Riki will have with her. Too bad we’re probably set down the Rin route, because Kurugaya is actually a character I’d like to know more about. Dark past? Troubled childhood? Very likely, actually.

Just when I thought that Muscles vs Kengo was starting to get a little repetitive, it was clever to spice things up and have Kurugaya fight Masato instead, radiating confidence that made me realize she knew what she was doing.  I have a feeling that Kyousuke turning up to impose his usual rule was more for Masato’s protection than Kurugaya’s, but I was more surprised by how Masato didn’t think twice about attacking a girl. Muscles, yay yay. However given that he had a toy pirate barrel while she had a sword and was already warned off fighting her by Kengo, he had all of that coming to him. No matter how buff you are, or how big your muscles are Kurugaya has a sword – your argument is invalid xDD We need a “Masato has been knocked out!” caption somewhere.

With the backdrop of the Komari theme tune playing I realized that Kurugaya might be lonely, and her seeking out Riki may have been her effort to try and find her group of friends. Has she been isolated in the past, or does she just naturally keep to herself? Either way I’m glad that she’s now part of the group and is actually good at baseball to boot! If they’re entertaining, I actually don’t mind the introduction of stereotypical character tropes into the cast – both Komari and Kurugaya have had their type of character appear in many other shows, but in this case they’re both likeable, which is what counts in the end. Let’s see how the loli next week comes into play.