Engage Kiss

Episode 11

Engage Kiss is a rollercoaster—not because the anime is a nonstop thrill ride (I wish), but because I never know when I'm going to get twenty minutes of dull exposition and when I'm going to see Shu's satanically possessed sister rifle through his sex memories. Thankfully, this week skews towards the latter example. And since I'm on record begging this series to be the weirdest and trashiest version of itself it can be, I have to praise this episode for veering back into some bonkers melodrama. Engage Kiss can be pretty fun when it disengages autopilot and gives its main characters license to stab each other through the heart.

Kisara begins this episode with her chest quite literally pierced by the awakened Kanna, but she ends the episode ripping her own heart out on her own terms. I like parts of this a whole lot. The overall arc, for instance, is satisfying, especially given the sense of tragic romance with which she bookends this installment. While the development is cliche as all heck, I'm going to again paraphrase my good friend Mari Okada and tell you that cliches are good actually. More to the point, we all possess unique weaknesses for certain cliches, and in my case, I'm weak for a demon choosing to defy their nature and do something selfless. Kisara's been wrestling with her humanity and monstrosity on and off all season, so it's not coming out of nowhere either. With some differently focused writing, Kisara could have been a really compelling heroine.

Engage Kiss' problem is that its writing is way too unfocused to sell the final thrust of Kisara's change of heart. It frequently misses the emotional forest for the unimportant worldbuilding trees. Although this episode is an improvement over the last several, it still has wasted scenes that screw up the momentum—basically everything to do with the government or other PMCs is dead air at this point. I also don't respect the decision to backload most of Shu's backstory with Kisara. Knowing the full picture now, I just think the absence of this context hurt the narrative's precious early moments. In other words, both Shu and Kisara sucked to spend time with until the show started treating them seriously, and the damage had already been done at that point.

It's a shame too, because there's a lot I like about these flashbacks. First off, the revelation of very, very minute incest is perfectly on brand for Engage Kiss' throwback edginess. There's no reason that Shu has to be a distant relative of Kisara, except that it adds just a little twinge of the taboo, and that's what the show should be aiming for. I also like this conniving pre-memory wipe version of Shu a lot more than the sadsack goober we've been stuck with. It might not be as flashy as poisoning his dipstick, but him trying to weasel out of a demonic contract with fine print is pretty funny. And it's great to see Kisara acting proactively too! She turns Shu's plan around on him and wins the upper hand and a working relationship full of smooches. This tug-of-war is much richer than the two-dimensional portrait we saw in the premiere, and it had plenty more space for growth and angst than the few snippets we were allowed.

The narrative wants us to sympathize with Shu in the end. We see his horror as he realizes what Kisara has done, and what she has undone. In actuality, though, right now I feel like Kisara deserved better. She deserved a more active role in the narrative, she deserved to not be so heavily flanderized from the beginning, and she deserved a more reciprocal relationship with Shu. Really, she deserved better than Shu, period, but I think their relationship could have supported the anime if Shu hadn't been written so poorly. There's a chance that we might see some of their potential fulfilled, given that Shu now has all his memories (penile neurotoxin included) and that I don't believe for a second that Kisara's memories are gone for good. However, I'm not getting my hopes up.

Much like our glimpse of Sharon Holygrail's nun lingerie, Engage Kiss' moments of true inspiration are all too brief flashes. The show can be better—it can be sillier, more melodramatic, and more fun—yet it's frustrating to see it consistently choose to be dumb in a bad way. Maybe that's why I feel like I'm too harsh on it sometimes. It's still a perfectly serviceable action show with an above-average visual identity. But I think it should aim to be more than a branded t-shirt lying crumpled at the bottom of a Hot Topic bargain bin.

Rating:

Engage Kiss is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Steve's Twitter DMs are open to vampires and vampires only. Otherwise, catch him chatting about trash and treasure alike on This Week in Anime.