Kaguya-sama: Love is War -Ultra Romantic-

Episode 7

This is the first episode in a while that probably doesn't stand on its own as strongly as previous ones. In fact, most of this episode is set up for major events to come in the next episode or two. We are prepping for the culture festival where everybody has their own desires, intentions, and motivations. We get hints of Shirogane's resolve, some nice callbacks to previous developments and we end the episode with a nice little affirmation between our two leads. My favorite bit was probably the one at the beginning where all of the boys are trying to come up with ways to impress Ishigami's crush, only for him to explicitly and thoroughly turn each of them down, since he's simping for her just as badly as they are. It does make me wonder if there's going to be any romantic development between those two during the culture festival or if Ishigami is just going to hang back and wait for some undisclosed opportunity.

The focus on Iino was also nice, although I feel like it'll be a while before the show really fleshes out her characterization. For someone so uptight and a stickler for the rules, it was nice to see her going so far for a relatively selfish desire. But she was only able to accomplish that thanks to all of the hard work and dedication she had put in before. This episode was full of a lot of nice character moments and it's far from bad. It's just that a lot of it is either stuff that we've already known about or stuff that gets brought up and will clearly be expanded upon next week. However, if the show is taking this much time to set up the dramatic beats to come, then I can only hope that when those moments hit, they are going to hit hard!

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Kaguya-sama: Love is War Ultra Romantic is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.