It’s the start of third year and Komi’s been thrown in a class full of people who aren’t really her friends at all. No time to worry, however, as a literal battle royale has broken out and it’s winner take… not much…
Well, you can’t win them all and the heady rush of a new class means a chance to cram in as many new characters as possible and for things to get precious little development in favour of lame gags.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, there are some solid jokes in this one, amidst all the churn. The battle royale is a shocking waste of a premise that this series would normally devour and seems mostly designed to show Komi in combat gear.
Which is unfortunate because it takes up almost the whole volume. And, as I said, parts of it are very good; the contest is based on basically shooting people with Nerf guns and that conceit pays huge dividends in a couple of scenarios, mostly with Najimi, whose reach exceeds their grasp by a mile, and Manbagi, whose new haircut is great, apropos of nothing.
But this is not an action manga and it becomes brutally clear that this is going to go on and on with very few memorable sequences and underbaked jokes left to fill the void - there are only so many ‘people think they’re the hero and then get immediately shot’ jokes you can dredge from that well.
Komi’s always a toss-up with me and the coin does not land well this time. Scattered gags do not make up for how overlong this entire arc is, and, oh man, Yamai, argh, just… hang on, I need to collect myself.
Look, I hate Yamai, full stop. So, when the story pairs her with Nakanaka and they continue their post-band association, and the yuri-loving student is shipping them… it quickly turns into the rare case where she hasn’t ruined the volume for me. So, naturally, one of the last chapters has her trying to get Komi to jump rope so she can catch a glimpse of her underwear. You don’t need a fake gun to shoot yourself in the foot, I guess.
Elsewhere, new class has one girl who doesn’t want to be Komi’s friend, which is a pretty unique thing in this series, honestly. But the story doesn’t really make half as much hay from it as it could, minus some very light tension. Komi and Tadano have some cute moments together, so there’s the interesting stuff.
But the rest of the class ranges from okay, the one guy who cannot seem to do anything without bumping into anything, to forgettable, the cute girl (it’s her thing, just go with it), all the way down to the absolute dregs - the guy who speaks in baby talk while sucking on a pacifier. He feels like a rejected script idea that got crammed into the book by mistake.
Nothing is worse than bad comedy, really, unless it’s bad comedy that’s occasionally good. There’s barely enough here, plus that storyline with the shut-in coming back to school would actually be great if it had better supporting material.
3 stars - like I say, it wasn’t that bad, but it also wasn’t that good. I get wanting to swap in a new group of friends, I really do, but they needed a lot more work to be anything on the crew we just left behind so memorably last volume.