English Dub Review: Girlfriend, Girlfriend “How Nagisa Feels”

Overview

Naoya, Saki and Nagisa are now living together. Keen to learn more about Saki and Naoya, Nagisa gets into her phone and looks through her browser history…

Our Take

This time around we have a sort of a Nagisa-focused episode. Although Nagisa was well-intentioned in getting to know the two, she kinda approached it the wrong way in browsing through Saki’s smartphone. It also comes across as unhealthy that Nagisa missed a good chunk of school just to mentally and physically prepare herself in the hopes of confessing to Naoya which were events that slowly lead to the first episode.

And while I normally hate romantic comedy anime where the male lead is violently abused as a punchline to a cruel joke. I don’t even feel bad for Naoya when he’s rightfully getting his ass whooped seeing as the two girls here are constantly feeling under pressure as if Naoya could dump either of them at any moment, despite his willingness to make this 3-way thing work.

Overall the first half of the episode was pure fun but not perfect. I feel like I’m watching a mediocre hentai without the sex scenes, only it feels like it’s barely even trying. And in the second half, it was giving its audience some mild character development for Nagisa. Still, as far as the plot goes, I’m interested in knowing how and why Nagisa fell in love with Naoya of all people. With none of the classmates and not even Naoya knowing her beforehand, it seems very odd. I also don’t like how Naoya also doesn’t respect any of Saki’s wishes, nor does he think about the potential consequences of making such a relationship public beforehand. All they have to do is just pretend they’ve never met and slowly become friends publicly and then they can all hang out without calling attention to what’s really going on behind the scenes. But as previously stated, this show and reality don’t often meet…