Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu Ni! Ep 12: Test of Courage

Minami…I feel so sorry for you =P

Summary

The Shoukanjuu system breaks down yet again, this time transforming everyone’s summons into Halloween-related creatures. To pass the time, a test of courage event is held in which the third-years compete against the second-years, while the latter try to get pass four checkpoints in a haunted house and the former has to try and stop them.

Impression

BakaTest returns its usual self this week with a full blast of comedy and Shoukanjuu! Except…wait. What’s wrong with them THIS time?

Conveniently, the summon system has broken down again, and the Shoukanjuu are all warped once more. It was much more entertaining than the last time it happened though – Akihisa’s one became a headless knight with a hilarious expression, Himeji became a succubus with huge boobs and Yuuji became a werewolf. And let’s not forget Minami’s WALL xD Compared to talking summons, a visual warp opens up so many gag possibilities (: Instead of letting the situation play out and die down, the principal uses this opportunity to pit the second-years against the year above them, which means that from Class F to A, the whole cast so far will band together!

The basic concept of the challenge is that second-years enter in pairs, and have to pass through four checkpoints, battling with paired up third-years at each checkpoint. If one pair gets through all checkpoints, the second-years win. However, if they make too much noise, they get disqualified – and so the third-years will try to scare them in a haunted house-like scenario along the way. I’m not sure if the second-years have been given too big a handicap, since  there are loads of nameless people in the year, and it seems that just one pair successfully reaching the end will count as a victory for them =/ However it’s true that the third-years are on a different level to their kouhai’s, though Voyeur and Aiko didn’t seem to have much trouble taking them out. Now that almost everyone except Akihisa, Yuuji, Shouko and Minami have been kicked out, they’ll need to think of a plan to clear the last two checkpoints that’ll actually WORK.

The ending was pretty funny xD Yuuko and Hideyoshi were actually doing really well after Voyeur got knocked out due to blood loss, but the third years all thought Hideyoshi was a girl, and one of them had written a LOVE POEM and CONFESSED O_O Which probably scarred Hideyoshi for life, leading him to once again question his sexuality.

I would have really preferred this mini-arc to be somewhere earlier in the series; since BakaTest is nearly over, I’m not too certain whether this type of premise will conclude the show properly. Well, Season 1 did it rather well, so I’ll hope that this time round they’ll do as good a job as they did before.