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Say ,,I love you'' is an anime about first love expirienced in high school just like many other shojo romance animes. And not the best one to that. This anime wanted to achive a pretty realistical portrayal of a teenage love, social life and lonelines, but it still went down the rabbit hole of generic, repeatable tropes and bad character writing.

Good start: The begining of the anime is pretty strong. We are introduced to our main character, Tachibana Mei, who is an anti-social, silent girl with a temper. In the past she had bad expiriences with friends so she decided to isolate herself and be ... alone. She attracts attention of Kurosawa Yamato (a popular boy from her school) by kicking him down the stairs when his friend wanted to peak under her skirt. Yamato wants to know her better really badly,but Tachibana isn't interested. She gives up and takes his phone number writen on a paper, which later turns up to be a good decision. And to this point of episode one it was a very basic, but than we get a very well done in my opinion portrayal of stalking. Mei works in a bakery, where a very creepy man sees her and gets interested in her. Next day he stalks her, and she is obviously very scared and hides in a shop. She decides to call Yamato, because she had no other option (her mom isn't home or something like that) and he takes it very seriously and rushes to help her. He scare the stalker away by, I guess, pretending to be her boyfriend - because he kisses her and says he loves her. And sure, he could act a little bit differently, not kiss her without her permission, but I personaly didn't had a big problem with this. I still thought that Mei and Yamato acted pretty mature in a situation like that, or at least in a clever way. But their inteligence is not to come back in the later episodes.

Overall look at the plot and the Mei x Yamato relationship: Mei and Yamato very quickly get in a relationship. Yamato was very pushy with making Mei his girlfriend but it once again didn't bottered me. He did stole a lot of kisses from Mei when she didn't wanted to, it wasn't a good thing, but the way it was writen wasn't bad, nor creepy. But it still may be uncomfortable for some watchers. Mei in this relationship was pretty okay I would say. At first she had problem to open up to Yamato but she made progres with each episode. Yamato is a whole other thing though. Sometimes his writing was very good and sometimes he acted in a way I would not expect him to. It started to bring my attention when Kitagawa Megumi, the love rival for Mei, was introduced in the anime. She is a new student at Mei's and Yamato's high school, a very popular model. She propose to Yamato that he could become a model because her agency looks for a male model. He agrees and began to work very offten as a model and even go mutliple times to Megumi's house for a meal after work. Mei is visibly affected by the fact that Yamato don't have time for her, but it gets only worse when students at school starts to talk about how Megumi is in love with Yamato and that someone saw him going out of Megumi's house. She feels insecure about their relationship. And her reaction is writen very well and realisticaly even. But Yamato? Yamato suddenly gets a writing of a stupid little boy. He don't even thing about telling Mei about the fact he goes to Megumi's house for meals. And it's not like he does something horribly bad, he just eat meals with Megumi but he don't have any concerns when he does so. He don't even think for a secound about the fact that he is in a relationship or that he don't really need to eat with Megumi anyways? And that is such a weird thing to me concidering how clever and understanding of girls he was in the episodes before. Now he don't know why Mei is acting strange. How weird. Mei's friend literaly need to tell him about Mei's wories because he is too dumb now to link the dots now. It looks especialy wrong when you have in mind that the whole school is gossiping about Yamato and Megumi. After this missunderstanding gets solved we get another love rival, but this time for Yamato - Takemura Kai. He is an old friend of Yamato that simply falls in love with Mei. He gets along with Mei pretty well but he don't intend on stealing her from Yamato or anything. Mei learns from him that she should voice out her feelings and concerns if she wants to keep up her relationship with Yamato. Their relationship was pretty okay, nothing romantic to it, but of course at the end there was a misunderstanding and Kai hit Yamato for some reason and they argued. And Mei was standing there??? Just doing nothing???? I think it was just weird that she didn't want to clear things up and stop them. Dialogues are very weird by the end of the anime. When Mei actually wants to talk about her emotions, insecurities and concerns (just like she learned from Kai) she barely says anything and Yamato reacts like if she just said everything that she is thinking of and the whole conversation about stuff like that ends. And I found it very weird and was unsatified. And don't give me wrong, my problem isn't the fact that Mei is a person that don't talk much. The thing is I just feel confused when anime wants me to belive that problems were cleared up by a very badly writen piece of dialogue. It's posible to write a short dialogue that would contain Mei's thoughts a lot better and won't feel like it's not enough. The worst part of this anime was it's last episode. It's the episode we expect to hear the long awaited ,,I love you'' from Mei. It turns out to be an episode that is of the trope that one of the main characters is sick. Yamato and Mei acted really strange in this episode. Yamato was turned into a comedy relief character because he is sick and acts funny, while Mei has her insecurities when she wants to go see him because she is woried. But the whole writing of the situation made it feel like she's out of character. This episode wasn't funny at all. It felt really out of place and when things got more romantic at the end we got an ending with different scenes from Mei's and Yamato's life and in the last secounds they kissed and a short, silent ,,I love you was said''. It didn't feel special enough. It was a very disapointing ,,I love you''.

Characters: I've writen pretty much everything that I have to say about main characters while explaining the plot and my problems with it, so I will only write about side characters in this section.

Nakanishi Kenji - he is Yamato's best friend and one of the first characters we get introduced to. At first he is awful and perverted but he calms down after getting in a relationship. From this point he also kinda stops being Yamato's best friend? He's just very npc-like and I don't think he ever talks with Yamato without his girlfriend also talking to Yamato. Just an npc, but at least we don't have to see his perverted side.

Oikawa Asami - she is Mei's best friend. She had her story arc about her complex of having big breasts, than she got together with Nakanishi, because he likes her how she is. Her wrting as a best friend character is definitely better than Nakanishi's. I think she's a nice friend.

Mutou Aiko - she is more of an interesting character. In the begining she is very mean to Mei. She also liked Yamato, because as it turns out, in the past he treated her nicely and also agreed tohave a one night one stand with her so she would feel better. Later she change her opinion about Mei and they become friends. She is the one to tell Yamato about the whole mess with Megumi and how Mei feels. She also have a boyfriend that she is happy with I guess.

Kitagawa Megumi - Megumi is a character that I really liked. She is very complex. She falls in love with Yamato and she would like him to return her feelings. She acts bossy sometimes and she has hard time fitting in and being perfect. Her apearance is her everything. She was nothing without it in her opinion. By the end of the anime she decides to finaly be herself and she cuts her hair short.

Takemura Kai - I liked him but I feel like his story was veeeery rushed. Especialy his character development. He is a good and smart guy but at the same time he seeks revange on the ones that used to bully him in the childhood. He very quickly realize that it's not a good idea after Mei tells him that and after one attempt to revange on a boy.

Kurosawa Nagisa - she was Yamato's younger sister and she was a very good writen character in this anime. She had problems at school and isolated herself for some time. Mei helped her feel better.

Hayakawa Kakeru - he is a character that shows up for like one episode, want to hook up with Mei or something and he suddenly calls Yamato in the last episode or something like that and tells him that he have a girlfriend now and he isn't sleeping with every girl he finds. Okay???

I would also like to say that Mei's mom and the miss from the bakery were very nice.

Visuals, music and conclusion: Animation and overall look of the anime is as expected from an production from 2012. It had a few pretty scenes but overall it looks just decent. I really like the art style though. It has a classic shoujo vibe but what caught my attention were the eyes and the hair of the characters. I really like this thick eyeliner on Mei, it reminds me a lot of Vampire Knight, in a good way. I also really liked the way Mei's haircut looked, it was very pretty. But by far the prettiest hair had Megumi. Her curls were awesome, and they looked so good when she cut her hair short. I would also like to mention that cats that apeared in this anime (and there was plenty of them I would say) were also very pretty looking. Music was okay and the opening was very good in my opinion. I like it a lot.

To sum it up I think that Say ,,I love you'' is a wasted potential. It started off pretty strong, characters were pretty good, but the inconsistent and sometimes just straight up bad writing of the characters ruined it for me. There is still things to enjoy while watching this anime, but I wish it was better. When I started watching it I really fell in love with the premise, I really liked Mei, I liked Yamato, but I enjoyed it less end less with each episode. I hoped for something better than this. I still recommend giving it a go, my score is higher than 5, which is my neutral rating, but it it's not a very good anime. I wish I could say ,,I love this anime'' but I just can't. I don't even know if I really liked it, because I didn't enjoy most of it after like episode 3.