It’s Shakuan no Shana S, the OVA series that JC Staff is giving us to tide us over until Shakugan no Shana III comes out, probably next fall.

Shana and Yuji sift through junk at Friagne’s old place looking for Hougu he’s stashed away when Yuji finds a telescope. He looks at Shana through it and the pair immediately switch bodies, and Alastor realizes that it is the Hougu “Reshuffle.” However, Satou and Tanaka, who were out buying ice cream, come back so Yuji-in-Shana’s-body has to throw as much junk in Shana’s cape as he can and hopes that Reshuffle is there for them to change back later, as Alaster impresses on both of them that no one can learn that they swapped.

The pair try to think of a place to sift through the junk. At first Yuji thinks of the party room of a Kareoke parlor, but find Margery drinking near by. He then thinks of the school, but the end up finding out that Yoshida and Ike are there to watch Ogata play a volleyball game. Worse, Shana-in-Yuji’s-body barges into their classroom while the volleyball team is in the middle of changing.

After finally escaping the school, they head to about the only option left: Yuji’s house, but run into Wilhelmina in town. Wilhelmina is immediately suspicious and sends one of her ribbons after Yuji’s body, but Shana blocks it out of instinct. This raises Wilhelmina’s suspicions even more, and Yuji is only able to get them out of it by yelling that he loves Wilhelmina, stunning her, and allowing the pair to escape.

The pair finally get to Yuji’s house, only to find Yuji’s mother there, who immediately suggests to Yuji-in-Shana’s-body that he should take a bath since Shana’s body is all sweaty, but Yuji is able to get out of this. However, once he reaches his room, he finds Shana doubled over and wonders if Reshuffle causes some sort of damage when used with a Flame Haze, so Yuji promptly dumps out everything that he stored in Shana’s cloak, making his room look like a disaster area.

Yuji’s mother, hearing the crash, arrives to see what happened, so Shana puts up a Fuzetsu, allowing Yuji to put all the junk back away and allowing Shana to grab Reshuffle, allowing them to switch bodies back. However, Yuji immediately finds that the problem Shana was having was that she ate so much ice cream that Yuji’s stomach was about to revolt, causing Yuji to sprint to the restroom.

Shana then asks Alastor why it was so imperative that no one find out that they switched bodies, so Alastor tells her that Reshuffle works only between two people who have no wall between their hearts.

I always kind of like body-switch episodes, and it works particularly well here with Shana, I think. They probably could have done even more with it, but most of the time was spent dodging everyone they knew rather than Yuji doing un-womanly things with Shana’s body (though there was some of that, such has him flashing Shana’s panties everywhere when climbing over the garbage at Friagne’s place).  Of course, this also let the writers to make Shana appear super-tsundre in this episode as well (and make Yuji look like a manly-man).

This OVA was created with the expressed reason of developing Shana and Yuji’s characters to set the series up for the third and presumably final season. Having that in mind, what did we learn here? First off, Yuji still has a lot of potential to develop his skills, as Shana was able to use his powers to their fullest extent. Second, we pretty much confirm, due to the nature of Reshuffle, that the two love each other, even if they aren’t willing to admit it to each other or themselves yet.

I’m not sure when this is supposed to take place, but my guess would be between the first and second seasons. Yuji has all his built up power of existence, so it is certainly after the first season, but Yuji supposedly “chose” Shana at the end of the second season, and it didn’t seem to me that their relationship was to that point here. Perhaps I’m wrong too, and we’ll find out more later, and we just didn’t see that sort of stuff due to the nature of the episode too.

I haven’t seen any schedule for when the next episode comes out, but there are supposed to be 4 episodes, and if we assume roughly the same amount of time between releases, and some time between the last OVA episode and a presumed season 3 in Fall 2010, we’re probably looking at something like 3 months between episodes, which would put episode 2 near the end of January, with the last two episodes in April and July (basically near the start of each anime season).