A prologue that is worth a million words that’s all about fun.

What They Say:
Yuzuko, Yui, and Yukari, three girls who just started high school in spring, are always together. After school, the three of them attend their own “Data Processing Club” with two computers and a whiteboard between them, searching for random words on Google and then discussing the results. Their day to day life is mostly uneventful, mainly only consisting of girls flirting, but for some reason it’s difficult to tear one’s eyes away from this new generation of high school girls’ communication.

The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Yuyushiki’s approach to humor is one that I continue to find a lot of fun, though part of me wonders if this is the kind of show that would excel at being a five minute piece that could run for a year or so instead. The small nature of the show, the fun and friendliness of the cast and the situations themselves are all things that works to its advantage overall, but they’re also pieces that I’ll easily admit over the course of a full length episode leaves me a little worn at the end. Some shows about nothing work better than others and this one does have the advantage of the club aspect itself and how they do try most times to tie things together. But sometimes the way it shifts between gags and stories leaves a bit to be desired, which makes me curious how it would hold up in a different format.

This episode kick off with one of the best prologue pieces I’ve been in an age with the way it does the whole mouth popping thing and the general frustration that Yui has over it when it comes to the other two. The show does throw some things into the episode that carries through at different points in time, focusing on Yuzuko’s odd dreams that place her in a feudal era with the banners waving and getting all kinds of battle on, or at least fomenting one with her words. Yuzuko is pretty much all over the map in this episode, which is where the runtime of the episodes can wear me down a bit since she’s such a strong personality. Going from the dream to grabbing a guitar from the light music club and trying to play and then jumping off to ball jointed dolls may make some kind of sense when you put everything together in context, but it’s also just so spastic that you wonder how much sugar she’s actually on.

Some of what makes the show the most fun is when “Mom” gets involved in it, especially since she often just can’t believe the kinds of things the girls say or do, leaving her speechless. There’s also the usual array of online discoveries that crop up, but they don’t leave much of an impact on this episode, though there are cute bits along the way, including Yukari with a health meter above her head for awhile. This episode also runs with some other basic stuff, which while cute in its own way because of the personalities, just doesn’t add much to it overall, such as when they play rock paper scissors and then go on about mouth crying and other strange oddities of existence in a way. It’s surreal and amusing in its own way, but it just reinforced things for me that there wasn’t a lot to work with this week.

In Summary:
Yuyushiki hit its high note for me with the prologue and just moved slowly downhill from there. Which was admittedly cute and fun at points in time, but there wasn’t a lot of really engaging or outright funny material this time around. The gags and stories have their moments but much of it reinforced for me that they’d work better in far smaller doses. With the show hitting ten episodes at this point, it’s starting to feel like a bit of Yuyushiki fatigue because of what it does and how it does it. There’s plenty to like in general, but this week’s episode just didn’t hit a lot of good notes.

Grade: C+

Streamed By: Crunchyroll

Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.