Meet Nishida’s sister (who is also Retro’s girlfriend).
Sudo from last season is now the final match reader.
Chihaya, and her new playing style?
A pretty interesting episode. Since Tokyo region gets 2 slots for the national tournament, both finalists will automatically advance to nationals. Yet this episode show us an unexpected twist thanks to Retro-kun’s pride. Instead of going easy by trying to secure 3 scores, he decided to match players from both teams against their equals. And the entire match becomes unpredictable.
Oe is surprisingly good against her opponent, (maybe) thanks to her admiration of Sudo’s skill as reader. But the rest of the team are facing hard time. At least it’s interesting to see how Chihaya manages to try a new playing style by the end of this episode. Using the strengths of Master and Queen? Now that’s something. Why didn’t anyone else think of that before? Maybe they did, just none of them succeeded.
It’s refreshing to see the “enemy” side is playing brave and fair. It’s nice to see that Hokuo’s “secret weapon” is actually putting pressure to themselves to play their best instead of using low tricks to their opponents.
Since the setting allow 2 schools to advance to nationals, my prediction is that Mizusawa will lose here, to make a rematch drama in the nationals. But we’ll see.
