This time on KanColle, good golly, Fubuki is really rather boring.

I mean, it’s not normally that much of a problem in the show, because a certain degree of grounding is necessary so that things don’t feel too weird then they throw the girls into a bloodbath of a skirmish. The problem this time is that the episode is straddling something of a tonal middle ground – for all the jokes about Yamato not being a hotel, it’s not an outright comedy episode like the Kongou-class or the Akatsuki-class episodes, but it’s definitely not an action episode like last weeks. It’s really just a kinda toothless episode about the melancholy of being an undeployed shipgirl.

Which isn’t to say it’s an awful episode of anime – despite all, any episode of KanColle is something at least I tend to enjoy more than an awful lot of other shows – but it’s definitely been the weakest episode so far for me, and that’s definitely because Fubuki is just that darn boring.

This may, however, just be me being envious for not having unlocked a Yamato in the game yet. Musashi, yes, but Yamato, not yet. Dang.

There isn’t really much to the whole Yamato Hotel joke – the Yamato Hotel was a chain of Manchurian hotels in the early 20th century, and the Yamato herself was almost hilariously luxurious in comparison to other ships at the time. Of course, as with in the show, she had such ludicrously high consumable consumption rates it was rarely practical to actually deploy her, so she spent an awful lot of time stationed at Truk, effectively doing nothing worthwhile for the whole war, before ultimately being sunk.

The English internets aren’t particularly useful in this regard, but a cursory scan in Japanese suggests that there was actually such a thing as Yamato Ramune – amongst the many lavish fittings on the ship were actual Ramune production facilities. Which seems kind of crazy, I suppose.

The Nagato’s talk about Fatigue here, and it’s talking about the game mechanics to some degree. If you send your ships out on too many – particularly short or unsuccessful – sorties in too short a time period, your ships start to get fatigued, represented by an increasingly grumpy face appearing next to them on many of the status and listing screens. Their state will slowly improve back up to a base level if left alone for a time, but whilst they’re in a bad fettle, their RNG rolls will increasingly tend towards the negative – they’re less likely to avoid damage, less like to hit opponents, and less likely to deal critical damage. It’s bad times, basically.

Hachi is sparkled here. Maruyu… not so much.

Of course, there’s also an opposite to this – it’s possible to “sparkle” ships, which will improve a ships luck with their RNG rolls for a short while. It’s one of those things which is kind of annoying, though – whilst you can sparkle to a certain degree by performing well on the daily PvP practice battles, the main way that people tend to sparkle their ships is to repeatedly run the games first sortie map. Whilst it only takes one run through that to sparkle a ship, assuming they’re not fatigued at the time, you have to run the map with just the one ship you want to sparkle. It’s kind of annoyingly time consuming to do this to everyone you are wanting to send on a sortie or any expedition, really.

Surely even you have to admit that Shimakaze on a surf-board is kinda funny, Ooi

I can’t help but think there’s an old saying what applies to Ooi here – something to do with a Kettle in the hand being worth two Black Pots in the bush. I mean, Ooi doesn’t exactly stop talking about Kitakami at any point either (if only sparkling Ooi in the game was as simple as putting her in the same fleet as Kitakami!).

This is one of those weird scenes which strikes as being weirdly anachronistic with other elements of the setting, though – the swimsuits, particularly Yamato and Kitakami’s, aren’t exactly what you would consider World War II fashion. Of course, the girls, according to the anime, are inheriting the souls of their namesakes as opposed to actually being the WW2 ships, but given some of the other adherence to period details, it’s just one of those things which smacks of having cake and also eating it.

Oh, and rather appropriately, the Diamond formation is used to buff your Anti-Air in the game.

I do wonder what the point of the whole, complicated launch sequence the girls go through in prior episodes is, though, given that Yamato seems to have been able to summon her rig out of absolutely nowhere with absolutely no pomp or circumstance in order to shoot down those aircraft.

Little known fact, but Yuudachi really wants to be a Submarine. Her “Poi” is her attempt at mimicking sonar.

In random talk, I ended up getting a box of the KanColle Puchi-Nendoroids they released back in December late on last week. It’s a pretty odd line-up in the box – you’ve got two Kongou classes, the two 5th Carrier girls, Kaga and Kitakami (Kai-Ni). They’re cute, and they’re nicely elaborate compared to a lot of other Puchi’s (though I do like Umbrella Ranko from the Cinderella Girls set in that regard).

What’s pretty fun, though, is that if you buy a whole box, you get a dopey ocean background and, not pictured on the Goodsmile page, a bunch of cutout explosions to decorate it with. I love dumb stuff like that.