This review has spoilers so if you haven’t watched Shigatsu yet, just scroll down to the bottom for the (spoiler-free) pros and cons section. If you do decide to read all of it, then you’ve been warned, it’s pretty long.
I would start by explaining the plot but I’m sure you know what it’s about by now. If you don’t know, go read it and come back. Did you read it? I don’t know about you but its premise to me sounds amazing. In fact, before Shigatsu aired, I thought it would be the easiest 10 I have ever given a show. However, I was quite
...
wrong and I’ll tell you just how bad this show actually turned out to be.
This is a romance and drama anime, and in shows of these genres the cast of characters is the most important aspect. There’s a lot to say about them but to summarize our cast in just two words, it’d be “mediocre” and “underdeveloped.” There’s honestly not much to say about our MC, Kousei Arima. I liked him most of the time. The only time I felt frustrated with him was when, in one episode, his mom’s ghost finally smiles and it looks like he overcame his fear of playing but a couple of episodes later, he’s back to crying and clutching his head. What happened to all that character development, ehh??? Oh yeah, there was also that one time he said “Kaori’s the only person I need” even though his friends have been with him longer than Kaori has. How can you just ignore your friends like that for some girl you just met? Despite that, he’s the only character who gets a decent amount of development and his outlook on life changes by the end. If you compare how he was at the beginning with how he ended up, there’s definitely a difference.
Our other MC, Kaori, is one of the worst-written characters I’ve ever come across in any medium. She has no definitive personality and most of the time she’s insufferable. At the beginning she seemed like a nice girl but as it went on, the worse and worse she got. She could be replaced by a cardboard cutout of a VS Pink model with a speech bubble saying “You can do it!” and the show would be 10 times better. She’s just a plot device and because of that, the author forgot to give her a personality. The little bit of personality she DOES have makes no sense and is just all around inconsistent. One second she’s smiling and telling Arima to believe in himself and the next she’s hitting him for no reason. At least in other shows, the tsundere hits the MC because he embarrassed her or made himself look like a pervert, but with Kaori, she hits him for literally no reason. Every time Arima asked angrily “what was that for?!” I was asking myself the exact same thing. Why, Kaori, did you hit Kousei when he did nothing to hurt or embarrass you? Please tell me, I want to know just as much as he does. Kaori also loves to spout philosophical BS that sounds like she got from one of those Tumblr pages filled with filtered photos with “inspirational” text on it that girls like so much. She makes those stupid philosophical speeches many times, too. It’s not endearing, it makes it seem like she’s trying too hard with this “carefree and happy” vibe she’s trying to project. Kaori is also manipulative, proven by the fact that she cried one time to get Kousei to be her accompanying pianist. She could’ve just calmly told him that she admires him (I’m sure he’s quite used to hearing those type of comments) but no, she had to go and cry. And to make her personality even more confusing, there was that one time she asked Kousei out of the blue, “wanna commit double suicide? Nah, just kidding.” Her “personality” is an utter mess. That’s not her only flaw, though. We barely find out anything about her. The only things we know about her is that she likes sweets, cats and that she always wanted to perform with Arima ever since seeing one of his performances when she was little. That’s pretty much it. Her character is confusing, extremely underdeveloped and there’s no way someone like her can exist in real life. I do not understand why people think she is a good character and cry when she dies. She isn’t realistic, relatable or likeable so why do so many people feel sad when she dies? It’s like if you were watching someone kick rocks. Do you cry when you see those poor rocks getting kicked about? Hell no, they’re lifeless rocks. That’s exactly what Kaori dying is like to me. I don’t feel sad or anything because it doesn’t feel like she could be an actual person, as if she’s just some rock.
Tsubaki is another main character and Arima’s childhood friend and as with every “childhood friend” cliché, she likes Arima and boy, does she take forever to realize it. It was absolutely infuriating waiting for her to come to terms with her feelings already. Her chibi comedy bits were unfunny and incredibly annoying. Most of the chibi segments consisted of her yelling nonsense at the people around her. The worst example of those comedy bits being unfunny and just plain disrespectful was when in the last episode, Kousei is reading Kaori’s letter by the train tracks, there’s a sad atmosphere and all, and then Tsubaki shows up uninvited and kicks him in the shin (while looking like a chibi) and yells at him “don’t ever think you’re alone!” Who thought that was an okay thing to add to that scene??
Watari is Arima’s other friend and another plot device. There are two plot device characters in this show??? Yup. Watari only exists so Kaori and Arima can meet, and Kaori only exists so Arima can feel better again without getting any actual development of her own. Back to Watari. His only traits are: acting like a playboy and liking cute girls and acting like a bro to Arima. Even when he said he liked Kaori (for some reason), Watari just put his arm around Arima’s neck and said “I know.” Watari’s 100% top bro material. Too bad he barely gets any character development, either. There was a scene with him where I felt was the ONLY time I actually related to a character on this show and it was when his soccer team lost a match and he cried over their loss. That’s kind of childish but I’m sure everybody has lost a match or some competition and cried or at least FELT like crying. I could relate to how he was feeling at that moment. However, that’s the only lick of development he gets in the whole show. After that he’s mostly just ignored.
There are a bunch of supporting characters that are just….there. They don’t add anything to the story nor do their personalities get fleshed out. There’s Takeshi, Arima’s “rival,” whose main traits are: sporting a frown most of the time, acting confident in his piano-playing skills and having one of the most ridiculous hairstyles I have ever seen. Seriously, his hair’s ridiculousness rivals even JP’s from Redline. He would be completely forgettable if it weren’t for his retarded hair. There’s the other “rival,” Emi, who is only there because the author says so. She likes Kousei as well, so I guess her only real purpose is to be the third girl in his little harem. She’s a pretty useless character too. Here’s my problem with Arima’s “rivals”: their “rivalry” doesn’t feel like a rivalry because he doesn’t care about them. Not once, during a competition, did Kousei look at them, acknowledge that they have talent and say “I’m gonna beat you guys!” like actual rivals do. Takeshi and Emi think of Arima as their rival but he didn’t even remember their NAMES when he met them again after their last competition together. It’s a one-sided rivalry and that’s why I put quotation marks around the word “rival,” because Arima himself doesn’t think of them as rivals, he just ignores them most of the time, like their talent is nothing compared to HIS talent. There’s also Nagi, Takeshi’s little sister. She likes to say “what a cliché!” a lot, which is extremely annoying. Even though she only got a couple of episodes in the spotlight, I felt like I understood more of her personality than I understood Kaori’s in the entire show. Arima’s teacher and mother figure, Hiroko, was a pretty nice person and I liked her. She didn’t annoy me and there were no scenes with her where I felt like strangling her. She’s probably the best character in the whole show mainly because there aren’t any glaring flaws in her personality or role. I’m going to talk about one other character that people never mention in reviews: Kashiwagi, Tsubaki’s friend. She had literally the worst character introduction I have ever seen: by not getting introduced. One episode, she’s not there, and the next she’s hanging around Tsubaki and getting screentime. I thought I accidentally skipped an episode when I saw her. We never find out anything about her, she doesn’t do anything to help Arima nor do anything significant of any sort. Heck, she even got a spot in the second OP. But just look at her MAL page. There’s nothing on it. She shows up a lot and there’s no info on her to put on there.
You see all these supporting characters I talked about? Yeah, all of them are pretty much useless. They don’t have very interesting personalities not did I ever feel like wanting to learn more about them.
Overall, the cast is absolute garbage. None of the characters are interesting and character development is non-existent in this show. Arima was the only one who got even a bit of development while everyone else was ignored. But hey, he’s our main character, he’s the only one that REALLY matters here, amirite?
There is also an insane amount of flashbacks, foreshadowing, deathflags and inner monologues. Even the supporting characters get flashbacks. There are TOO. MANY. FLASHBACKS. The “foreshadowing” was incredibly obvious and made you see the ending coming from a mile away. They even made it seem like Kaori had a chance of living. There was one scene where her doctor tells her that she can have surgery and she decides to have it. This scene brought us false hope, making us think she’ll live, but since we’ve been stuffed to our necks with deathflags, it’s no surprise she ends up dying anyway. In one of the later episodes, Kousei comes out of the hospital (after visiting Kaori) feeling depressed, he sees that the black cat that REPRESENTS KAORI is lying on the street after being run over, dying, and he picks it up and tries to help it but it dies anyway. If that isn’t the most obvious “foreshadowing” ever, I don’t know what it is. It’s not subtle, that’s for sure. The inner monologues are just as annoying as the flashbacks and they show up at the most inappropriate of times: during performances. The most idiotic example of inner monologues interrupting the music being played was in one of Emi’s performances. Instead of hearing the piece she’s playing, what do you hear instead? Emi’s voice in her head exclaiming, “Hibike! Hibike!” Just STFU, Emi, and let me hear the song you’re playing! I hate it when people praise this show for having classical music in it when you can barely hear it. All you hear is the characters’ voices OVER the music.
The “romance” in this show is abysmal. If anything, it’s quite shallow. Kaori started to become interested in Arima after hearing one of his performances (and the reason why I say Kaori was only “interested” in Arima and she didn’t “like” him is because we never find out if she likes him or not. This makes their little romance one-sided), and the only reason why Arima started to like Kaori was because of her violin-playing and her little inspirational speeches. What, does he go falling in love with every one of his therapists, too? Because that’s basically what Kaori is to Arima. There is no romantic development between our two MCs, and they like each other for very stupid reasons.
One last thing I want to talk about is Kaori’s disease. They NEVER tell us what disease she actually has. It’s like the author just HAD to make her have some sort of disease but didn’t care enough to think about exactly WHAT disease she will have. I have seen people try and GUESS what disease she has based on her symptoms. The very fact that people had to GUESS and that the show never told us is incredibly lazy on the author’s part.
I will talk about the good parts, though. The OPs and EDs were above-average. I even listen to 2 of the songs regularly because I just liked them SO MUCH. I have one complaint, though: the second OP wasn’t as good as the first one (although I still liked it) and it didn’t fit the overall tone of the show in the second half. Luckily, the second ED makes up for the positivity of the OP with a more sad melody, definitely fitting the tone better than the OP. The animation was pretty good and the backgrounds were lovely. The actual animation was pretty solid, for the most part, but sometimes they used still shots during performances, so whenever they did that it just looked lazy. I was quite pleasantly surprised at how the last episode and Kaori’s death played out. The last episode was really well done (except for that one scene with Tsubaki I mentioned earlier). I thought the last episode would have a really depressing tone and lots of crying and screaming from Arima but the atmosphere was actually quite mellow compared to other episodes and there was no crying, either. After Kaori’s death, they skipped the whole grieving process (I’m quite thankful they did that) and moved ahead to a little while after her death when the characters have gotten used to her being gone and have stopped crying. This creates a very peaceful atmosphere. Another thing, Kaori’s “death” scene was actually quite tasteful and special, in a way. The way they showed her “dying” was a pretty good way to show her leaving the world. And that concludes my points on the good parts of Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso.
As for my personal enjoyment…..there was none. At the beginning I quite liked it but the more it went on the more I hated it. I didn’t ENJOY watching these kids deal with their problems. If anything, I feel only pity towards these characters, living in that sorry little world of theirs.
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Pros
+ Above average OPs and EDs
+ Good animation
+ The last episode was well done
Cons
- Characters are unrelatable, boring and underdeveloped
- Lots of useless characters
- Foreshadowing was incredibly obvious, completely ruining the ending
- Too many flashbacks and inner monologues
- The slapstick chibi parts weren’t funny and uncalled for at times
- Terrible “romantic” development
- Performances kept getting interrupted by inner monologues, not allowing you to actually hear the music being played
For those that haven’t watched Shigatsu yet: if you like classical music, don’t watch this because you can’t even hear the music anyway. If you like romance, don’t watch this because it’s not romantic in the least. If you like watching realistic and interesting characters, then DON’T. WATCH. THIS. Don’t even watch it for any of the pros I listed. Just look up the OPs and EDs on youtube and save yourself some time. Don’t watch it for the last episode because it’s in no way worth suffering through 21 other episodes to watch, and if you’re watching it for the animation then you’re watching anime wrong. None of the pros I listed are worth picking this show up to watch.
I gave this show a 2 because there is NOTHING about this show that could’ve saved it. I couldn’t even find anything about the characters or story that was actually good. The only reason why I didn’t give it a 1 was because I loved the opening and ending songs, but that’s it. This show is garbage and it’s not even worth the salary of the animators who made it. It is horrifying that so many people think that this show is good simply because it made them CRY. Just because it made you cry doesn’t mean it’s a good anime, it just means you’re a huge baby who gets attached to cardboard cutout characters easily. I’m probably the biggest crybaby I know and I couldn’t even FORCE myself to cry at the end. It is a disgrace that better shows such as Yojouhan Shinwa Taikei and Uchouten Kazoku get rated lower than this turd.
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Sep 2, 2015
Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso
(Anime)
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This review has spoilers so if you haven’t watched Shigatsu yet, just scroll down to the bottom for the (spoiler-free) pros and cons section. If you do decide to read all of it, then you’ve been warned, it’s pretty long.
I would start by explaining the plot but I’m sure you know what it’s about by now. If you don’t know, go read it and come back. Did you read it? I don’t know about you but its premise to me sounds amazing. In fact, before Shigatsu aired, I thought it would be the easiest 10 I have ever given a show. However, I was quite ... 
Jun 28, 2015
Notes: There’s a TL;DR with pros and cons listed near the bottom if you don’t feel like reading the whole thing. There are very minor spoilers in this review. Also, this review is mostly for those people that haven’t watched Maji Love Revolutions yet (I’ll just be calling it MLR) and have watched the other 2 seasons and want to know if it’s worth watching but people who have already watched it are welcome to read it too. This is also my first review, so feedback is greatly appreciated.
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