Kokoro Connect – Love Only Lasts One Season

While three episodes do remain, Kokoro Connect’s televised run ends with this spectacle – unfortunately resulting in perhaps the first mentionable area of dissatisfaction as this pseudo-finale feels rushed to an end.

This isn’t a complaint just yet – reason being that the series could answer the issue within the final three episodes. And not to mention, even if this flaw went unchecked, Kokoro Connect has still delivered far too much at a caliber that could kill from the sheer impact for a single slight downside to have any overall negative effect. Now as for what the problem in question happens to be, it’s that this episode just suddenly collapses to a close – Heartseed literally appears from nowhere, says the strange phenomena are now over, and the arc concludes happily ever after.

It’s the most fantastically underdeveloped turn of events anyone will ever see – as the series attempts, and admittedly succeeds in embedding some kind of central story and theme, yet it feels as if randomly conjured. It’s not necessarily an irrelevant episode – although it only further pounds an already slaughtered horse into hamburgers.

Carrying on with the episode of last, Taichi’s submissive attitude results in him sharing with his friends exactly what the second creeper stalking his friends told him not to – thereby now making everyone susceptible to becoming a child, even Taichi, and sporadically at any given time as well. As result of the increased risk and danger, the crew decide to refrain from heading home – and this somehow brings about focus on Iori, as all of a sudden, an abusive stepfather of her past has returned, and Iori doesn’t want to leave her mother alone with him.

With that matter laid out, the series turns towards the usual glorification of friendship – a teary-eyed Iori being given a lecture by Inaban that apparently no one tape-recorded the first several times it was made throughout the series. Once several minutes are expended on how friends can do this, and how friends can help with that – eventually, Iori finally accepts the proposal of receiving help with a personal woe, and the series moves forward a bit.

Everyone starts dashing over to the Iori house – yet on the way, intended to be a dramatic rise in tension, the blonde bishounen Aoki turns into a toddler. In response, his blond bishoujo lover stays back, leaving only Inaban and Taichi to accompany Iori as she heads home to save her mother.

Those three end up being confronted along the way by the legitimate Heartseed – who besides merely saying “it’s over” and bringing an abrupt halt to a multi-episode segment of plot, also gives Iori the opportunity to start her life over again, a dark desire for which she may have acquiesced had her friends not been with her.

Afterwards, the blonde characters manifest from who knows where, everyone goes to Iori’s home, the abusive father is evicted for eternity, and it’s a basic favorable conclusion at that point. However, following a peaceful skip through a month or two showing that all has gone well ever since, the episode makes its final second one in which Iori asks herself whether she truly has any romantic feelings for Taichi or not.

Iori’s apparently now questioning her love – a topic which will account for the final three episodes of Kokoro Connect.

Whilst this episode was arguably unimpressive, a horrible word to hear since every other installment of the series has been just the opposite – one does however have to commend this 13th affair in that it secured three full chapters for the exploration of whether Inaban will be limited to touching herself indefinitely, or will she no longer need worry about bringing pain to a friend by advancing in her desires of affection.

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