Urara Meirochou Episode 10 Review – “Four Girls and the Ranking Exam are Sometimes a Trial”

Actual plot development happens in this episode! Oh, my stars and comets!

(Spoilers in this review) 

It’s the day of the exam for rank 10 Urara to potentially advance to rank 9. Everyone’s feeling a bit nervous, including Nina-sensei.

Once the girls reach the venue, Tokie-san (who is, as you know, Kon’s mother) talks about the exam. Since there’s too many 10-rank Urara, they have been split into 10 different teams (and our main heroines are all on the same team). The teams are to enter this dangerous labyrinth in order to retrieve arrow-keys. There’s only 3 arrow-keys, however, so 7 teams will fail this portion of the exam and thus drop out.

All the instructors will be dressed up as Oni and will attempt to hamper the students. That’s quite troublesome for the rank 10 Urara, really. After being introduced to the students, Nina-sensei runs out to great Saku, who is convinced her bodysuit is lewd. Nina-sensei decides to give Saku a piece of her mind as a result.

Meanwhile, the girls are preparing to enter the labyrinth. Chiya notices that there’s a shop renting Urara equipment out to the examinees and ties to ask the others to accompany her – only to realize that she’s the only one who doesn’t already have specialized equipment.

Once the girls enter the labyrinth, they encounter a few traps here and there before deciding to use divination to figure out where the arrow-keys are. Nono believes that the arrow-keys are put in dangerous places. As an example, she talks about how Koume will hide her precious food so others don’t eat her edible treasures.

With Koume leading the way, the girls start down a dangerous path and get jumped by three Oni! One of which is Onina (aka Nina-sensei). Thankfully Nono’s singing put them all to sleep. Apparently weak singing voices are potent lullabies. Let’s just call Nono Nyquil, then, okay? Actually, Nono is easier to type, so never mind…

The girls continue to follow Koume’s lead and they come across three dangling lever-thingamajigs. They decide to pull on them all and Kon suffers for it.

After experiencing great headpan (I tried, okay), Kon decides to unveil her new technique! She allows a fox spirit to possess her and lo-and-behold it’s the same fox spirit as before. The kitsune wastes no time in tackling Chiya.

The trapdoor lead the girls the last remaining arrow-key. Chiya feels a bit upset since she couldn’t really help the others with anything, but the girls are quick to reassure her. They then hand her the arrow-key and head for the exit. Before Chiya could follow them, however, she experiences a bit of a repeat from episode 8. Except these voices and hands and eyes call Chiya a disgusting, trecherous child that they finally found. Creepy!

The episode ends with Chiya sinking into the floor, arrow-key and all. I didn’t expect this episode to end with such a cliffhanger but I’m glad the show defied expectations. Maybe next week some light can be shed on Chiya, the Urara who everyone says has huge potential but has really yet to show it outside of a few minor cases.