Back to Yami-chii's Profile Yami-chii's Profile

So yeah. We all know the tragic story of Romeo and Juliet; The son and daughter of rivalling families who fall in love with one another. We all know the cheesy crap the said to each other. Pain, hatred, sadness and a love that could not be. Nothing new about that. So with that said, it may seem impossible to make an interesting anime out of it. Without boring people with corny, overused vows and predictable plotlines. However, Romeo x Juliet proved the opposite to me.

Story:
The first thing I liked about this story already was the fact that the 'Mysterious Hero' in this story, is ... the girl. It's the girl who saves innocent townpeople in distress. It's the girl that risks her own life in order to save other's. All that, while in the beginning, the boy is more of a wuss. A very kind wuss though. =] Apart from that, the story didn't seem to be all that promising from the start. The first few episodes were a little bit predictable. Boy meets girl, girl meets boy, fall in love, and then find out it's an impossible love and all that stuff, but it got way more interesting after a few episodes. The story gradually unfolds in a way that's easy to follow, yet not slow. Turns out there's a lot more to it than Shakespeare's original play.

Art:
Okay, initially, I had a little problem with the art style. But as soon as I got used to it, I also came to love it. It's way more realistic than all of those huge-eye-animes, and that suits the story as well. (I'm not saying the story's realistic though, it's fantasy after all. ^^ But the feelings of most of the characters were illustrated very realistic.

Character:
Sometimes I get a little tired of anime where every character looks identical except fot their hairstyle and -colour and their eyecolour. It's really refreshing to see something like Romeo x Juliet once in a while, where you could immediately recognize each character just by looking at them, even it they were wearing a wig and colour contacts.
Based on character design, there are three sorts of anime: Anime where every single person is pretty. Most of the time I find anime like that pretty annoying, but in cases like Clannad, Ef, or Nana, I can get over it. Second, there are anime where all the goodies are beautiful and the baddies are ugly. (Even more annoying, if you ask me). And last, there are anime where characters looking ugly can still be good guys, including handsome bastards. Romeo x Juliet belongs to the last sort, and also the most realistic sort. Even better is the fact that basically there are no real goodies or baddies. Most of the bad guys just do what they're told because they're scared, and even the biggest badass is not completely evil. It's no good or evil. Just people like you and me who do good and bad stuff. That's the way I like it.

Overall:
This is the very best anime I saw ever since Clannad, and I can recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good love story. It got me in a really romantic mood, and sometimes; I just wanted to hug my laptop. It didn't brought me to tears, but I think this should be able to make somebody cry. For the anime-boy-fangirls among us, there's plenty of drooling materials with Francisco, Tybalt and Romeo himself. However, if you want bouncing breasts and 'accidental' panty-shots, you shouldn't bother wasting your time watching this until you grow up.

WARNING! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS!
When I started watching this, judging from the picture at anime newsnetwork, seeing all the girls, while reading the main protagonist is a boy, I expected a harem anime. It was already obvious from the start that Sana and Nanaka were gonna get together. However, in the beginning, it looked a bit like Aoi-chan was in love with Sana too when she was blushing in front of him and such. So the when Sana met Hoshino-san and Nanaka got all jealouse and stuff, it fellt like the starts of just another love triangle. But after a few episodes, I became happily ... suprised.

Most of the time, 12-13 episode-animes don't really capture me. They're just too short to really get to feel with the characters, but this one did a pretty good job in that. First, it was a nice, enjoyable anime, nothing more though. Things like Nanaka being depressed for unknown reasons, Hinako having a crush on Shuusuke, Shuri bullying the guys and Aoi-chan being way to hyperactive and screaming "Tanoushii this" and "Tanoushii that" with her sqeaky voice got a little annoying after a while, and I started wondering if this was going anywhere.

When Nanaka's past came out, things got a little more interesting, although the scene of Nanaka crying in Sana's arms and Sana saying stuff like "We'll always be together from now on." still felt a little cheesy to me. As for me, the series really started blooming when the Shuu/Shuri-arc started. From that point on, the several plot-twists and character development really surprised me. For example Hoshino-san's story justified a lot of those things that annoyed me earlier on, because they all made sense all of a sudden, plus, because they made it look like a love triangle at first, the truth was an even bigger shock.

In the end, the character I felt most connected with was Shuri, and I felt a strange desire to have a twin brother like Shuusuke. I kinda missed them during the last two episodes. Nevertheless, the ending did satisfy me a little. =]