English Dub Review: Watari-kun’s XX Is About to Collapse “Do You Really Love Her?”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Naoto continues to try and be a good boyfriend to Ishihara and mend things between her and her mother, but then finds out that Satsuki may be suddenly leaving for good and insists on following her to her parents’ house.

OUR TAKE

Just when it seemed like all was well with the Naoto and Ishihara relationship, we have Satsuki coming back into focus, and it’s mainly because she looks like she’s about to be OUT of focus. Whether she’s felt neglected by Naoto or not really able to make new friends of her own, this sudden summons by her parents to come home seems kind of…extreme? Like from what Ishihara (and by extension we the audience) overhear, it sounds like she’s going to need to leave school or at least move to another one, though the details about why are currently unclear. But the point of this turn of events is to see how the potential of Satsuki being gone forever impacts on him. Back when I thought this would be a twelve episode season (so, basically a couple weeks ago), I was actually curious if they would leave things off on Naoto being with Ishihara instead of Satsuki, which I knew couldn’t last due to the narrative convention of these types of stories, but would at least be good to leave the first season on. Sadly, this was not the case, and I definitely see some storm clouds in the future for Ishihara, and it mainly comes down to the fact that something in Naoto just can’t let Satsuki go.

Part of that is the two of them having a complicated past that neither have really been willing to process, and made only worse because Satsuki started this series being INCREDIBLY FORWARD with her advances that really freaked Naoto out but also made his teenage hormones activate like crazy, and now she’s suddenly leaving which is only going to hook him more on everything unresolved between them. But we still have probably about another dozen or so episodes left to see all this play out, so maybe there’s hope for Naoto to stay with the sensible and even headed love interest as opposed to the erratic and very erotic one. Look, he also had that very mature conversation with her mom, so I’d say that’s a sign of good things to come! Oh, and Umezawa is still here and constantly hitting a brick wall in her efforts to somehow seduce Naoto. There, I mentioned as per my obligatory duty to update on all the love interests in the episode. Anyway, now we’re back to episodes I haven’t seen yet, so let’s see where this second half of the season takes us.