The exam continues and Ichiroku really needs to learn to work better with others.

What They Say:
The battle exams continue with Ichiroku making it to the semi-finals by herself with some amazing shots. The next round brings the duo Galil and Sako, both very dangerous and vengeful guns, which one girl will find out.

The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Upotte worked in the battle exam in the previous episode, along with a dose of character material and history material, which makes this episode easy to work with as it just continues on with the exam. The girls are all doing their best, but some are obviously performing better than others. Ichiroku in particular does quite good and has excelled where others have not, even against some tough challenges. Others like Eru are just falling apart in a lot of ways, seemingly literally if you go by what Funco talks about at one point, so the field of exam takers continues to be whittled away.

The exam phase goes on for a good bit here as Ichiroku and Eru have to go up against some very strong opponents in the form of Galil and Sako. The downside is that because of her view about Eru and the way she’s just a knockoff copy, she refuses to actual partner up with her in a real way to fight. That works out fairly well at first but as the shooting match gets even further underway, she ends up in some tough spots and really does need help as things get worse and worse. There’s an early match here where we see just how well she can do on her own even in a very tight spot, but you can’t help but to feel that if she did things as she was supposed to, as part of a team to help balance each others weaknesses, she’d do better.

As the match goes on, there is something twistedly wrong about the show as one of those hunting down Funco gets so intense about the situation and so aroused by it that she’s got her hand between her legs and has plenty of fluid visible as part of it. It’s an odd situation because in one way you want to be glad that a show will go the distance while on the other hand, they’re guns. And it’s just too weird. Funco is definitely taken down hard by her and that just keeps the intensity of her arousal up, but the whole exam just feels weirdly stilted and in a way kind of pointless. But there’s a general lack of definition about the series and what it wants to be that I’m still not surprised by this feeling.

In Summary:
Upotte is sitll the kind of show that leaves you feeling a sense of WTFery about it as you try to grapple with what it’s attempting to do. The basic idea is easy to get, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. Especially since it does largely go the route of a traditional show with just some quirks about the characters. This episode skips the straight out history lesson, thankfully, and feels less like a gun fetishists wet dream than some of the previous episodes. The exam dominates this episode but what it’ll be remembered for is one of the girls in it getting herself off in a pretty hard way over the idea of what she’s capable of while watching it all unfold. And even that wasn’t all that memorable in the long run.

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.