As I mentioned in my overall review of the Golden Week arc, that was an arc that was begging to be animated, and sadly was not. It also thoroughly smashed the existing status quo with a literal and metaphorical nutcracker, with Nagi giving up her fortune and her house to save Hayate.

This leads to this volume, which is basically trying to set up the new status quo. In this case, Nagi has a cunning plan!

The plan is threefold:

1. Get a building and turn it into apartments!
2. Get tenants to move in!
3. Profit!

While this is is, admittedly, one step over the Underpants Gnomes plan in that it is fully formed – it does have a few fatal flaws. First, Nagi fully expects Hayate to do all of the grunt work, an expectation which actually helps set up Nagi’s character arc for the storyline to come – for the past 24 volumes, Nagi has fully taken her wealth for granted. Now she’s in a position where she can no longer do that.

We get a little bit of that here, with Nagi sending Hayate to buy a building with only 20 million yen – approximately $200,000 US. Hayate finds out that this simply isn’t enough. Nagi is, right from the get-go of this arc, facing the limitations of her money. That amount of cash would barely buy a single occupancy dwelling in Oregon, never mind something large enough that Nagi could both live there and also be able to rent out space, and in more expensive markets like New York, San Francisco, and Tokyo you wouldn’t even be able to get that.

Consequently, I’m really pumped for the arc to come, as I feel like it’s going to have a lot more character growth to it than some of the arcs before.

Hayate the Combat Butler Volume 25 is available from Amazon and RightStuf. Buying anything through those links helps to support the site.

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