Okay, where to start with this show?
I started watching this show with very low expectations. I hadn't heard much about it, and didn't do much research about it. I really only knew that it was a harem-y shounen show. End of story.
Fast forward to the first episode. Ignoring the fact that you are beaten about the head with the characters' observations, and the rather slow-moving first episode, we are set up with a rather cliche situation: Boy returns to old haunt after many years away to find that many things have changed. Now, this is not necessarily a bad thing, and based on the feel of the first episode, I was preparing to watch a rather light and fluffy superficial anime...
Well, I managed to get one out of the three right: This was certainly a superficial show, if not light and fluffy.
The first two to three episodes were okay, not gripping and not particularly intelligent, but okay. We see that our protagonist has a few personal issues to deal with, as does our main heroine, which should be a good way to introduce some intriguing conflict, right?
Well, the writers and producers definitely managed to insert some conflict into the series, unfortunately it was of the soap-opera, melodramatic variety. Now, I like conflict as much as anyone, but when I look at how much external conflict they have jammed in this series, it really makes me want to roll my eyes and give the writers a guide to writing.
Let's break it down:
- Melodramatic slap when hero somehow doesn't recognise heroine.
- Heroine completes 180 and becomes jealous over new girl Asami.
- Cue multiple ridiculous situations in which hero and Asami are found in one-another's company by heroine.
- Domestic abuse exhibited on two occasions.
- An evil step-mother.
- A psychopathic grandmother with homicidal tendencies towards pets.
- Hinted twincest.
- Political intrigue in the school's administrators.
- Council fraud and deception.
- Psychopathic Evil Lesbian™
- Parents who are not parents.
- Real parent dies of cancer.
- Fake father goes homicidal and suicidal setting himself and wife alight.
- Scarred heroine makes disturbed pleas for help to empty postbox.
- Bullying.
- Double suicide attempt.
All in 13 episodes of a school-based series.
"
Tip 1: Thou shalt not insert ridiculous conflict into series to make up for a poor plot and character development."
While external conflict can move the story on and allow the characters to be explored in different situations, the story lacked the appropriate focus on internal conflict that would have fleshed out the characters a little more than we have perhaps seen.
As has been mentioned previously, it makes it hard to empathise with the characters and their problems when the scenarios are farcical. Instead of being emotionally moving and powerful, the scenes ran into the ridiculous, and I found myself physically scoffing at the improbability of it all.
To add insult to injury, the story is built up to the point Sana reveals the secret of his troubled past to Nanaka, a perfect opportunity for them to connect and to allows us some resolution of the romantic arc. But what do we get? A skip forward in time by ten years, and a terribly out of place epilogue. It was almost as good as the one we saw in Mai-HiME.
I do feel honestly sorry for the talented seiyuu who were involved in this show. There were some great performances -- especially during mundane scenes, but the melodrama killed any sense of escapism for me. Good performances from: Koshimizu Ami (Nanaka), Tamura Yukari (Shuri), Koyasu Takehito (Shuusuke) and Nakahara Mai (Asami).
Overall I gave this show a 2/10. The lack of credible character development, buckets of ridiculous melodrama and lack of anything resembling a sensible plot made me thoroughly dislike this series through and through. I only watched it through with the smallest of hopes that it would sort itself out. I was sadly mistaken.