Itsuka Tenma no Kuro Usagi

"I will become stronger..."

This was one of those animes that I just found while browsing My Anime List and stumbled upon the recommendation section. I ended up watching the first episode as soon as I found it, despite some of the slightly low-rated reviews I read about it. Now, the thing that stood out the most about this series wasn't the story, the characters, or even the fight scenes. No, it was how fricking colorful this anime was. Seriously, despite the amount of anime I've seen in the past, I have never seen such colorful hair on characters, like, ever. Without further ado, let's get ... this review started, shall we?

To start off, let's get into the story. Upon first glance, this anime is supposedly about a vampire and a human, who met each other years ago. She fell in love with him, and granted him a power which allowed him to have 7 lives every 15 minutes. It sounded interesting, but then stuff happened and the main girl got kidnapped and trapped in another dimension for years and years, while the human boy's memory was erased. Later on, once he enters High School, he somehow gains his memory back after being hit by a semi truck and healing his scattered limbs. He remembers the vampire girl, and he finds her once again. Then more stuff happens, and the story just gets more confusing as it goes on. To be honest, I still don't know what the main plot of this was supposed to be. All I know is that it felt kind of similar to pretty much every romance/echii/action anime out there. To sum it up, the story will not completely hook you onto the show.

As I said before, the thing that caught my eye when first watching this was all of the colors. People's hair were multicolored, the sky was a completely abnormal color (never seen a sky turn bright purple and pink before), it was like I walked into a double rainbow and it suddenly started raining skittles everywhere. It was very strange, but it was decent quality. Most animes these days usually have pretty good art styles, so I was content.

Not much to say about the voice acting. They played their roles well, and that's pretty much it. Sound effects were good, I liked the Opening and Ending songs. That's about it for anything sound related...

I think out of all the characters in the show, the one that got on my nerves the most was Haruka. For those of you who have seen this, you will either be all like, "Oh yeah, I totally agree with you" or, "What?! What about Mirai! She was way more annoying!". To be honest, I liked Mirai a lot. She had loli written all over her, and I liked her energy and enthusiasm. But the thing I didn't like about Haruka was the fact that she couldn't let something go, even if it killed her. Obviously the 2 main protagonists are into eachother, but since she's into the main guy, she tries to steal him from Himea every chance she gets, and it got annoying. What's worse is that her entire class supported her. Other then that, I liked the main protagonist, Taito, he was pretty cool when he wanted to be. Gekkou was kind of a jerk at times, but he brought some pretty good comedy in the last episode, plus he knows how to handle weapons pretty well. Himea was probably my second favorite character out of the entire cast. With her love and compassion towards Taito, you can't help but root for her whenever you can.

Now, the main question, did I enjoy watching this? The answer: meh... to be honest, the only reason I continued watching this was because I wanted to just get it finished so I could move on to more anime. I can't not finish an anime once I'm halfway through it, so overall, it was so-so. I wouldn't recommend this to everyone. I know everyone has mixed opinions about it and that we all can't agree on everything, but if you were to put this on your list, this might be kind of a last option once you get all the other important anime out of your way.

Open endings, don't you just hate them? It's okay when a sequel is made but nothing of the sort is even planned. This is something Zexecs keeps doing, examples of this are Densetsu no Yuusha no Densetsu, Chrome Shelled Regios and of course this series, Itsuka Tenma no Kuro Usagi. However this series lacks a lot of things that the two other series listed above have. It doesn't leave you wanting for more like the other two.

The story is a mess. For a series that is only twelve episodes long, it jumps from place to place a lot. Although the events do have some ... sort of connections to each other, they seem to come out of nowhere. Even though there are a lot of things happen, the plot hardly goes anywhere. Almost everything that happens is not interesting or memorable. The ending does set itself up for a sequel but here’s the problem, when has Zexecs ever created a sequel to anything? The answer to that question is never, and it’s not just this anime produced by Zexecs that has an ending like this. They have produced a number of anime that don’t have a conclusive ending. However despite having a lot of negatives, the series does have some positives to it. The plot does have some uniqueness to it and it is not as predictable as one may think. The creativeness was there and if the series had been executed better who knows, the plot may have been interesting.

Any series that can develop characters well in 12 or 13 episodes deserves applause because that isn’t a lot of time to really give any character any deep development. Like many other series of that length, it falls short in the character department. The main male protagonist isn’t very bright, he just dives head first into any given situation without thinking anything out. He is nearly immortal but nearly dies on numerous occasions because of his own recklessness but without his reckless nature nothing interesting would happen so it’s understandable to why they made the character this way. He also doesn’t develop much through-out the series, he remains almost unchanged from the beginning to the end of the series. At least he isn’t oblivious or spineless. He does realize the love triangle that he is in even though it is blatantly obvious. The female characters don’t develop much either and they can also get pretty annoying with how clingy they are. They have no depth to their character. The side characters aren’t that much better either, none of the characters really stand out and aren’t memorable at all but since the series was only 12 episodes long, we can’t really expect much.

The art is colorful is say the least. Every character has a different hair color and some have more than one hair color but it looks like they got lazy with the character designs, they look very basic, nothing popping out and two of them even look the same. The animation is pretty average, not bad but not outstanding either, it looks like something you would expect from any other anime.

The sound is pretty average too. Nothing special, the opening is fast which gets you pumped and the ending is very sweet. Both are catchy but nothing special.

The genre of the anime gives the creators a lot of flexibility and because of that, there is a certain degree of expectation. It can be entertaining but at the end of the day the series just falls flat on its face.

Overall the series is very unique but it is lacking in many areas and negatives really overshadow the positives.

So we step into the world of Itsuka Tenma no Kuro Usagi....or as I'd like to call it, pure chaos. I honestly tried giving this anime a chance, as I am a fan of shoujou romance with fantasy aspects, which this anime claims to be.

Story 2/10:
As the show first opens, we are shown the main protagonist, Taito. He has immortality due to his childhood friend-who-is-also-a-vampire. That's pretty much the basis of it and doesn't go much further than that. The show has no whole plot. There I said it. Throughout the entire ... show I honestly had no idea of: what the heck was going on, who the enemy was, or if the main characters were actually going to get together officially or not. The show tries to pick up many different genres like romance, fantasy, action, harem, supernatural, and high school and it is poorly executed. It started off strong with the idea of giving this boy powers that were not as common (only have seven lives until perma-death), and the fact that a vampire girl with some strange pink-blue gradient hair was giving it to him (I feel that the fact that she was a vampire was long forgotten by the second episode). There's no main plot, but rather small mini stories throughout, that don't make a coherent story.

Art 7/10:
The art in Itsuka Tenma is probably the only decent redeeming quality of the show. It's very atmospheric and can clearly portray the supernatural and mystical settings. It uses bold colors for common items, like changing the night sky and moon to bright pinks and purples, or even making the trees red and black. The female characters all had a unique gradient hair style which I found rather appealing. The male character designs are rather common, with features like extremely spiky hair and school uniforms.

Sound 5/10:
Not much to really say here. The voice actors are fine as is the music. Nothing really irked me overall.

Character 1/10:
Welcome to where the show really falls flat. I don't really want to go into much detail, because if I do that I'll end up talking about it forever. There is not much more to the characters that can be described in a sentence, "He wants to be strong to protect the girl he loves.", "She's lonely, but she has him and he will help her.", "He hates his brother and wants to defeat him.", and "She likes soda and to have fun". Any other character is there purely to fill up the roster. The romance scenes are no more than the protagonists saying each other's names over and over and over again.

Overall 3/10