Adventure/Action with Unclear romance?
 

Heyo! I've been watching Asterisk Wars and I've finally become fed up with the whole "clear-cut going to be the MC's end love" BS, because I hate being able to tell which characters are going to be sidelined and which characters the MC actually develops a relationship with. 99/100 times, I am able to tell who the MC'll be dating/kissing at the end of the series, and that gets boring. Usually it's simply based on how much screentime a girl gets, or whoever chronologically shows up first in the MC's life. I'd love to see a show that takes a VN approach to a harem, where it's totally impossible to tell who the MC will end up with.

I'm not even sure if it's possible to have a harem where it's not obvious who the character is, due to the potential pitfalls in story writing. But, if there is some sort of action/adventure story like this out there, and it's well done, I'd love to see it!

Thanks for your time.
David.

Well... the reason it's obvious is because the relationship has to develop. There's little value in a sudden connection at the very end without development. Unless it's not a major aspect of the story, and it's kind of strange to look for a show based on a very minor aspect of the story.

But there are exceptions and allowances to everything. I'll wrack my brain a bit...
RahXephon comes to mind, if only because it handles things a little unusually.

You can try Tokyo Majin. It is not really harem but it has some complicated polygons here and there.

Also Original Macross is thing (triangle).

This really is a hard one. As said, having a romance requires a developing relationship, and with most anime being 13 episodes long there's not that much room, so it becomes necessary to have things relatively well hinted early on. The only alternative I can see right now is shows where they never answer the question and just maintain the status quo of multiple heroines all having a good chance of winning. If you're willing to go that route, you'll have a ton of works, from shows with a definite romantic subplot despite its never going anywhere, like Dog Days, Kanojo ga Flag o Oraretara and Tenchi Muyo, to shows where any romance is only occasionally hinted, like Higurashi and Shokugeki no Soma.

One show where it's relatively hard to tell IMHO, though I was one of the crowd that rallied fairly early on to the winning ship, is The World God Only Knows. The romance does develop and the hero does truly fall in love, but the author did fairly well at hiding this, partly by forcing the hero to "conquer" one girl after another. Not to mention that some of the cues that one may take to know who the hero will love are clearly not followed, and the characters that do follow those cues remain big enough players to raise strong doubts in just what would happen.

Ultimately, it seems like the certainty of the outcome actually becomes greater with the number of serious candidates, probably because you have to spread the air time out among them, decreasing the average air time of anyone who's not set to be shown developing a deep relationship. With five or more characters, you generally have one, maybe two episodes devoted to any particular choice and the rest taken to flesh out the real relationship. With two or three, the author can dedicate more time to demonstrating the chemistry between the hero and each heroine individually, leading to a much vaguer romance.

this is an hard one, if you want it to be action/adventure i dont really know...if is only harem the only one who ever suprised me with the "winning" girl was shuffle