Rokujouma no Shinryakusha!? – 05

The roommates’ time at the beach turns sour as the Yakuza Bros turn out to be ghost hunters and steal Ghost Girl. With a little guidance from Sakuraba, Satomi leads the remaining roommates in a daring attack to get her back and defeats a giant ghoul-lady-ghost boss monster along the way. Happy endings and deeper friendship ensue.

This week’s RnS thankfully ignores the fact that it’s the second part of a beach & hot spring fanservice episode and jumps right into what really matters: introducing even more characters with inane, unexplained motivations!

No seriously! I appreciate the vague explanation about who the Yakuza are and what they are up to but it wasn’t necessary to introduce another sexy-lady-ghost into the mix. Especially when she doesn’t seem to have survived her fight with Team Roommates.

Likewise, if we’re honest, we didn’t need to know anything about the Yakuza either, since they too are throwaway, nonsensical, and not very funny characters.

And humor is ultimately RnS’ central problem. Specifically, when you get past the quirky ‘skins’ applied to the cast, their bones — their archetypes — are completely pedestrian, which puts all the weight on RnS’ visuals and Story. Sadly, RnS’ visuals are average at best and the narrative is soft-ball goofy for-goofy’s sake and not really funny either.

So here we are at episode 5 and we’re watching a comedy that isn’t especially funny, dotted with a little fanservice, which isn’t drawn especially well either. So why am I watching this?

Technically, there are two mysteries behind the narrative that we haven’t uncovered yet (the shrine and what Satomi is knitting) but the suspicious lack of shrine since the premiere leads me to suspect it will either come out of nowhere to wrap the show up or never return again and the specifics of Satomi’s knitting is hardly enough to justify more episodes…

At best, we could be rooting for one of the girls to ‘happily ever after’ with the protagonist. I’m not sure I care, though.

Do you?