Oh boy. Episodes eight and nine are both full of emotion. When I say emotion…it really pulls at your heart. You really feel for the characters…and can make one a bit weepy. But they are both very good episodes nevertheless. These two episode reviews are going to be quite lengthy so let’s jump right into the review.

Episode eight begins by revealing that Arata has once again failed seven of his exams, meanwhile An has finally passed hers. Oga found it hard to believe An had been the one that scored a 2 on her first math exam. The teacher asks those who failed more than three exams to come see her and will allow makeups. When Arata goes to see the teacher in the staff room, she asks him if he had been unwell when he took the exam. He replies that he had been just fine, and then the teacher tries to figure out what had gone wrong. It just seems to me that Arata is just bad at exams period; seeing as every time he does a make-up test, he fails. The teacher wonders if he could be studying the wrong thing, and tells Arata to hang in there.

At this point it seems Arata is getting frustrated with himself. He tells himself that he could have gotten sick of it, run away and just give up. But the one thing that’s positive, is that Arata feels like he’s already changed a little bit, and that’s pretty much what the goal is from ReLIFE. While he is talking to the teacher, we see another person that failed five exams and it ends up being Honoka, Kariu’s friend and rival at the same time. This is somewhat bad, as Honoka is the team captain of volleyball and the teacher tells her if the team captain is too busy with make-up exams, that would be a bad example.

Honoka and Arata leave together and start talking to each other. We finally get more detail about a different character other than the usual. The struggles that Honoka goes through is revealed. She talks to Arata, telling him that she was at the school with a sport scholarship. She admits to him that she is not good at studying. Honoka reveals that the reason she chose Aoba as her school was that her two friends Aki and Nobu were going there. So obviously she has a close relationship with the two guys. Honoka asks Arata if An has a crush on Oga, and Arata tells her no, and he is quite sure about it. When Honoka leaves, Arata runs into Hishiro and asks her to walk with him to the station.

Kariu is told by Honoka that An does not like Oga, and she panics. All through the episode, at least after the scene of her studying with Aki, people have mentioned to Honoke she doesn’t look well. It seems she had been overworking herself in between studying and playing volleyball. After practicing volleyball, Honoka leaves the school and it ends up raining. She runs back in to see if she can find an umbrella. She goes by the locker room and hear other girls talking about her. She hides when she hears footsteps approaching.

It happens to be Kariu, and she overhears it. When she starts yelling at the other girls, it seems she cares about Honoka, despite being competitive with her.

Meanwhile, Arata studies by himself for the make-up exam, while Honoka gets help from Aki. To no avail, Arata fails again, but Honoka passes. It’s after this that Honoka decides to practice volleyball, and she notices her hits are weak. When she’s about to go home, she passes out, and balls roll out everywhere on the gym floor. This causes Kariu to fall and sprain her ankle.

Honoka blames herself for the accident and when she apologizes to Kariu, the redhead basically screams at her, hurting her feelings and causing Honoka to run away in tears. She leaves the school building and stands still, crying when Aki and Nobu head towards her. Aki knows something is wrong when she doesn’t answer their calls to her and he pulls her so he can look at her, and she is CLEARLY upset. This pisses Aki off, who already seems like a moody guy, and we find out what he wants Kariu to do, but we don’t see that until episode nine.  But we can see how close Honoka is to the two boys, and how much they will protect her, especially Aki. Stay tuned for the review of episode nine.