English Dub Review: Conception “Secrets in the Early Afternoon”

…Okay, THAT was kind of cute.

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Mana’s usual shenanigans lead Itsuki to Arie, Maiden of Aries and woman of the cloth, who scores a few points with. Later, he runs into Yuzuha, Maiden of Pieces and a bit of a shy type. He goes over to her house to get to know her better and finds out she’s actually a pretty skilled artist who sleeps in a coffin. She also doesn’t have a lot of confidence and doesn’t like going outside or talking to people. Itsuki tries to remedy this by taking her on a date outside to see if she can get inspiration for her paintings. Things seem to go well for a while, but a misunderstanding with Mana leads Yuzuha to crawl back in her shell again.

Itsuki goes to Arie for help and she explains that Yuzuha has a disease that shortens her life every time she sleeps, which explains why she carries the coffin around with her whenever she goes outside. Mana makes him a coffin as an apology, which Itsuki takes to Yuzuha to make amends. The two have a fun time outside, even exchanging puns about the Pieces constellation. The day ends with her falling asleep in Itsuki’s arms. The next day, she asks to do the ritual with him, and so they do. Itsuki then brings a present to Arie, which turns out to be a whip.

OUR TAKE

Alright, I guess they CAN be nice when they want to be. This is the first time we’ve really had an episode solely dedicated to one of the girls without forcing in overly complicated explanations about how this is all supposed to work. Without that, we have plenty of time to dedicate to what dating sims and their adaptations are about at their core: developing intimate character relationships. Previous episodes condensed Itsuki’s “conquering” down to one or two scenes that immediately convinced the girls who weren’t his cousin to go to bed with him. Now we get almost a dozen that fleshes out Yuzuha’s daily life, her skills, her insecurities, her likes, her dislikes…you know, things I assume you need to become romantically closer if I ever stepped out of my house for anything other than school and fast food.

Yuzuha herself is actually a pretty adorable character on her own. She’s a gifted painter (apparently, we don’t really get a good look at her work), is really passionate about her work, and is always open to being inspired to paint more. But because of her shyness and anxiety, she finds it hard to connect with people and barely goes outside. Itsuki is still a bland cipher and inserts character for the audience, but he’s still at least able to make clear that connecting with someone who barely does so with most anyone else is a really rewarding experience. Admittedly, creating fictional dream partners who you strongly and immediately bond with is one of the more potentially creepy things about games like this, but if you’re into it enough (and remember that it’s fictional), it can make you feel like you’re right there yourself.

But of course, there are the usual issues that keep me from rating this much higher than my usual score. For starters, giving Yuzuha a “sleep sickness” that is slowly killing her is a bit much considering it plays no role at the end of the episode and seems like an artificial way to add drama when it really wasn’t needed. Unless it’s going to come up again before the end of the series, it just didn’t need to be there. Likewise with the now typical “love ritual” scene in the bedroom after we know it only needs to be a strong emotional connection. Heck, they probably could’ve technically done it right out in the open. And clearly, the show doesn’t seem to care about the Star Children this week because we don’t even get to see what the Pieces one looks like.

Next time looks like more good news as we seem to be doing another two-fer with Gemini (my sign!) and Aries. Maybe we’ll speed through this thing yet.