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Ok, so this is my first anime review. After hearing many people rave about this so-called "great" anime, I thought that I would give my input on what I personally thought of this show.

This anime is supposed to be really emotional and tear-jerking, but the only tears that I experienced were tears of boredom! I had to sit and suffer through the whole series at an anime club meeting because I really had no where else to go. I was trying hard to get into the series, but I just couldn't, and here's why:

Story: Story? What story?! There's no real story here! Just some dude ... helping a bunch of girls with their emotional problems! You call that a story?! Although I suppose the question posed is which girl he will end up with in the end (By the way, I already know who he ends up with in the Afterstory just from reading the synopsis, but I won't spoil anything and I don't intend to watch Afterstory). It sounds like the synopsis to, oh, I dunno...pretty much every other harem out there! By the way, I hate harem with a burning passion and I'm sorry, but this anime is really no acception. The only difference is that this is harem makes a desperate attempt to try to be "meaningful" but fails horribly (I will explain why later).

Art: The colors are pleasing on the eyes and the scenery is well-lighted. Unfortunately, neither of those things can make up for the utterly generic designs of the characters. Every character basically looks the bloody same! The only real differences would be the hair and eye color! What's especially disturbing is how sickingly cutesy and moe everyone looks. There's no variety! I mean, C'MON, you need ugly characters to balance out the cute and pretty ones (at least that's how I see it).

Sound: Nothing too memorable here either. I only found the "Dango" ending mildly amuzing, but's that's about it.

Character: They say you can have best and most original storyline in the world, but without good characters to move the story along, you've got NOTHING. And this especially rings true with me. See, this is the major problem I have with the series: the CAST! Most of them failed to impress me and draw my interest. For one, the main character Tomoya has no personality whatsoever! He's nothing more than a vessel for his female classmates to dump all of their emotional baggage onto. And the other characters are pretty much card-board cutouts of character archetypes from other harem shows like Air and Kanon. There's really nothing special about them. Most of them are dull and flat. The only somewhat interesting one was Tomoyo, after I've seen her beat up that gang of boys. I thought that was pretty badass and was pretty much the highlight of the show for me.

Enjoyment: As I was saying earlier, this show was obviously created to be an emotional tear-jerker and, therefore, "meaningful". I, however, wasn't moved one bit. The characters emotions just seemed so fake and artificial that it was really hard for me to care about them, especially since most of the characters don't appeal to me in the first place. The creators' attempt at trying to create pathos just failed for me. I found this show to be pretentious, contrived, and boring. Sure, there were a few comedic moments, but they were too few in number and couldn't compensate for all the sappy, corny melodrama of sob backstories in this show. If the show had a better cast, more comedy, and real raw emotions instead of the characters just simply sitting perfectly still telling their stories, I probably would have enjoyed the series a lot more.

Overall: If you're a drama fanatic and you like moe and emo characters, then this is the show for you! As for me, I wish I'd have gotten all those hours of my time back because I thought it was pointless, sacarine, moe fluff and I really don't get all the hype behind it! As I see it, it's really no different than anything else out there.