The second episode of Henneko didn't disappoint; in fact, it turned out to be way funnier than I expected. I had a few good laughs this episode, and I felt that the scenes were pretty well executed with good pacing including the drama at the end.
My thoughts:
In this episode, we learn some pretty interesting things. Azusa had no friends in her old school and hence transferred. At the same time, she's trying to maintain an ojou-sama facade in her new school (with much thanks to Youto) and seems to have difficulty accepting others as friends. I do wonder what's her backstory?
On Tsukiko's front, things do not appear to be going that smoothly as well. There seems to be some form of conflict between her and her sister; they obviously did not appear to get along all that well during their coincidental meeting in the arcade which eventually developed into something like a a confrontation. I hope we'll get to explore more of this in later episodes too.
Even with all the story development and drama though, we had no lack of fun scenes this episode as well. Youto's inability to conceal his perverted nature led to some pretty epic shenanigans this episode which were entertaining and enjoyable.
To top that off, Ogura Yui and Ishihara Kaori's voice acting really shone through this episode, each bringing much life to their characters. And when their two characters came together in the later part of the episode, you could really tell that the two of them have really good chemistry between them – you could almost tell how close they were in real life through the characters that they portrayed.
While Tsukiko might not be able to express her emotions through her face or voice, we are reminded that her actions and body language are still existing avenues for her to convey her feelings (Youto could tell she was scared when she was shaking and hiding behind him). Apart from that, something I really liked was how even tense situations in this show are dissipated through comedic means such as the scene in the picture above as well as when Tsukushi threw Youto onto his fellow club members after he screamed “RUN!” and grabbed her breasts.
On another note, many scenes in this episode look like they came straight out from a visual novel, perhaps because of the art style and Kantoku's character deisgn. Besides, story wise it seems to me that Henneko would make a darn good visual novel as well since well, there are different “routes” for the characters after all. What do you think?
Screenshots:
Full-length images:
And with that, we've come to the end of another episode of Henneko. The drama at the end of the episode was really unexpected, but it was very well done. I can't wait to watch the next episode!