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I finally read the whole thing.
NOTE: 1/2 Prince's story changes drastically past Chapter 43.
Be aware that reviews made before Chapter 40 aren't accurate to the story as a whole.
** This review will contain marked spoilers **

1/2 Prince was a manhua I read while the series was first being translated. Back then, only about 35 chapters were out, and I thought the story was a silly, gender-bend romcom with some VR-MMO fantasy/drama elements. I forgot about the story until recently, so I decided to go back and read the whole story to completion now that it's finished.

The main premise of the story (during the first half) ... is indeed still a silly, fun, VR-MMO romantic comedy. The main character, Feng Lan, joins a game called "Second Life" (no relation to the real game by that same name.) Second Life is closer in style to World of Warcraft, and has a Medieval Fantasy MMORPG setting, while touting realistic pain and feeling sensations.

As a bonus for being the first player to log on, Feng Lan gets to cheat the character creation rules. Usually players of this game MUST base their avatar off their real body and real gender. But Feng Lan uses her log-on bonus to alter her in-game gender and become a boy. Thus starts her adventure as Prince, the male elf.

The story then follows Prince's video game adventures, as Prince gains allies (and enemies) by going on quests and doing whatever s/he feels like. The story is targeted to a female audience (bishie boys and BL pandering a-plenty!) and the plot isn't too deep. Events happen and characters appear out of nowhere. New characters will suddenly become blood rivals, or lifelong friends, or enemies, or lovers -- after maybe knowing each other for 5 minutes. You just have to nod and go along with it. But even with this breakneck fast pacing, the story is still enjoyable in its light-hearted, fun ways.

The characters are silly, but fun to watch. I caught myself cheering for some of the romances. At around Chapter 35 I thought the story would focus on Prince becoming a legend in the video game, all while trying to balance his/her social life. Feng Lan keeps running into people she knows from the game in her real life, and has to hide her true identity from them. This drama between Feng Lan's "virtual self" (a beautiful, brash male elf) and her "real self" (just a normal university girl) causes problems with her friendships, and adds drama to her love-triangle romance.

Alas. This is not the direction the story continued to go.

**SPOILERS FOR STORY ENDING BELOW**
** Spoilers end at next asterisk.

Instead of focusing on Prince/Feng Lan's relationships and social life, the story keeps adding TONS of new characters without expanding on any of them. The plot shifts to being about Prince conquering the video game continent (and also having an idol tour somewhere in there?) while ultimately not changing the status quo other than introducing more characters, so these arcs feel like filler.
Then, the author decides to pursue the plot idea of NPCs gaining self-awareness. The entire story changes from silly romantic-comedy, to an Action Sci-Fi Thriller...and not in a good way.
The romantic subplot is ignored in favor of an NPC Invasion where the game itself gains sentience. The story tries to make some broad statements about robotic awareness, and then forces everyone out of the game, where the plot then continues in the futuristic sci-fi reality. In real life, Feng Lan and her friends must now hunt down a terrorist who hacked the game. The terrorist is trying to merge with one of the game's sentient NPCs to give himself immortality since he's dying of a terminal illness. Said terrorist literally holds the government hostage during all this and sets of a nuke (with thousands of casualties) and no one really is bothered by this nuke or talks about it again. Feng Lan and friends, despite being normal civilians who have no right having anything to do with this, chase down the terrorist and have a REAL gunfight battle for the right for Second Life to continue with sentient NPCs still inside it.
Also im pretty sure there was a male pregnancy of virtual children somewhere in there.
I kind of checked out while reading the last few chapters because it made zero sense.

**END OF SPOILERS**

So TL;DR:
Silly gender-bend romcom with some early 2000s humor and values, mostly targeted towards teenage girls and featuring lots of pretty boys. About halfway through completely switches plot directions.

If the premise sounds interesting to you, the first 30 or so chapters are decent reading for fun. For me, the series ended right after Kenshin was introduced. Everything after that felt like someone else wrote it.
3/10 for what could have been.

Recommended with a few caveats! Small spoilers for overarching themes, so I've marked this as having spoilers.
In ReLife, Kaizaki gets to go take a pill...and go back to high school again! There’s no time travel or anything, he's actually a 28-year-old that looks like a teenager. With a premise like that, I was pretty interested to see more.

On the surface the show seems to be about overcoming one’s shut-in status, but it's more about learning to open up to people, overcome grief, and enjoy the ephemeral moments of life. It is NOT so much about overcoming anxieties or work-preventative behaviors, despite that being what it ... looks like in the first few episodes.

Once Kaizaki goes back to high school, the story focuses on his relationships with other students. It becomes a romance/drama slice-of-life, with occasional breaks to focus on the social experiment of the ReLIFE project.

The romance was the most engaging element — a bit of forbidden love for excitement ("I’m 28 and she’s a high school student! I shouldn’t be thinking about this at all!"), and then two other high schoolers where we get to see their development as they realize their budding feelings for each other. Both were intriguing and handled well. The only problem was the relationships felt a little cut short due to the show's runtime. (As time of writing this review, I haven't seen the second season.)

The "science/social experiment" aspect of the show…was where this struggled a bit. It’s never really explained as to why anyone thought returning adults to high school would benefit anyone, or what the actual goal is of the experiment. High school can be a horribly demoralizing place full of cliques, bullies, misery, and cruel teachers. Guess what’s missing from this show? The most difficult thing our main character faces is social awkwardness. Other than that, most of the high schoolers are nice people that are trying their best. The teachers are all pleasant and supportive. It almost feels like the school was conveniently filled with kind-hearted high schoolers that are just now coming to adult-level realizations about their senses of self…

The only way I see this being written off is if the entire school was managed by the ReLIFE project system and all the students/teachers were hand picked to have the correct aptitude for the experiment. (Or maybe all the students are secretly adults a part of the experiment?) The more I saw of the ReLIFE project and its "Support Handlers" the more it felt flaky and bizarre. It just had one too many "Why would a company do this?" moments to feel immersive.

I will say though that the show was engaging and I enjoyed the characters and the laughs. There was a nice mix of humor to drama, and overall the show felt uplifting and enjoyable. It is worth watching, even if sometimes it misses its mark or confuses its messages. It’s still a story full of hope and full of desire to inspire its viewers. I always respect works that acknowledge psychological problems and treat them not as "taboo" or "wrong" but rather as a part of the human condition — worth looking into and exploring.

(Side note: For some reason this show decided to use a strange mix of Jazz Piano for its background audio. It is frequently loud and somewhat jarring to otherwise emotional scenes and can actually overpower the vocal audio. It's not that bad most of the time, but there's about 10% of the show where the BG audio really overpowers everything else. Headphone users beware, these scenes can get really loud.)

This show exudes early 2000 vibes.

In short: a standard everyday Japanese boy named Yuri is going through a normal day, when he accidentally gets flushed down a toilet into another world. Yes. A toilet. Honestly, considering how many isekai stories there are now, this was a refreshing parody ahead of its time.

Yuri arrives in a fantasy land of swords, magic, horses, and strife. And immediately finds out...he's the demon lord!! Except wait. Despite that frightening title, demon lord doesn't really mean much. Demons in this world are basically just a race of humans, except with more magical talent and longer life spans, that have their ... own Kingdom and culture...but are otherwise still humans. (Honestly they looked exactly the same as humans and acted exactly the same, and I wasn't sure why the story decided to call them demons, but eh.)

Suddenly appointed to Kinghood, Yuri struggles to know just how he fits into this magical new world and how he'll handle an ongoing war. But good news, he's got lots of retainers to help him out, and whole vassals of royal families, and also his fiancé. Though, much to his chagrin, said fiancé is male, since Yuri attempted to insult the boy by slapping him across the face, and didn't realize that in this world, that was a proposal of courtship. Whoops!

The whole show is on that level of silliness. It's a comedic adventure romp, that happens to also have a solid fantasy story going on at the same time. Despite the layers of slapstick comedy, the show does manage to have a fairly competent adventure plot -- with some political intrigue, dramatic backstories, and quests throughout the country for Yuri to journey upon. The quality of storytelling does fluctuate. Some of the filler episodes notoriously transform the characters into idiots running right into danger and spouting out-of-character platitudes for twenty minutes straight. But when the main story is happening, the writing shapes up and manages to be surprisingly good. I was into the series mostly for the comedy, but ended up staying for an unexpectedly decent fantasy adventure.

The anime was released during a time where shows were expected to have longer runs, so Kyo Kara Maoh has over 80 episodes to build up its world and characters, which is a good thing. Too many fantasy genres in anime get squished into the 12 episode limit of one-season, and thus aren't capable of building their story correctly. So it's nice to see a fantasy story that had time to shine (and also be a completely silly mess.)

There's also an ever-present BL vibe through the whole thing (as might be obvious by our main character getting formally engaged to another boy by the second episode) so many of the side characters have flamboyant tendencies. For me, this was a welcome addition in most cases as I found it hilarious, and it again parodied the usual "boy falls in fantasy world and suddenly gets a ton of hot elf girls" by instead giving the main character...more and more middle aged dudes to deal with. (Though the joke with the purple-haired guy clinging to Yuri did get old eventually.)

So don't watch this with the family unless they're all okay with some very openly BL humor, often held in bath scenes.

It's a feel-good show and silly adventure that occasionally dips into a darker, more serious fantasy plotline. It's not perfect. There's definitely some budget animation, dumb moments, and pretty bad filler episodes. It has some preachy speeches, and Yuri can come across as a naive pacifist (though it is eventually explained why he's like that, more than just being inexperienced.) But it's nice to watch Yuri's desire to stop war through peaceful means, and see how it changes his commanders' ways of handling the situation. It's something you want to believe in, even if it does come across as childish.
I just can't help but like this stupid show.

A delightfully wonderful comedy, slice-of-life, and chill series about a twenty-three year old city boy going to live on a country-life island.

Our main character, Seishuu Honda (often referred to as Sensei) is a struggling calligraphist trying to find himself and his own personal art style. He still has the maturity of a child, which is both unfortunate and fortunate for him. He acts on his impulse to punch a high-standing calligrapher judge in the face. Seishuu’s father sends him to live on Fukue Island for awhile to cool his head.

It was fun to watch Seishuu grow as he met the kids on the Island and ... came to slowly open up and accept himself. The show was a wonderful mix of comedy to heartwarming, and gives a brief glimpse into life in semi-rural Japan. The pacing was nice and had some great moments of comedic timing. It manages to pass on an uplifting moral without having to be overly-positive. Though it can come across as a bit campy at times, it’s a good kind of camp.

My only downside would be that the show included a 'fujioshi' character and used her as a reoccurring joke. She was used for a few laughs, but was a more appealing character when she was just acting normal. Still, she’s a side character and only in a few skits so she can be easily overlooked.

The voice acting (especially for the kids!) was amazing. The children sounded like children, realistic screeches and voice cracks and all. The children ACTED like kids! The author had a fantastic grasp on the childhood mind and what it means to be mature or immature.

Definitely a series I could see myself rewatching. I wish there was a little more but at the same time I’m very pleased with this 12-episode season. All-in-all: a very good show!

Okay so I'm a fan of "Phantom Thief" themed shows. The main characters are thieves that steal treasure after giving an advanced notice to the police. It's a game of Thief vs Cop and whoever wins gets the treasure.

The "Phantom Thief" idea is a pretty common story in Japan, I've seen lots of shows use the theme to varying forms of success. DNAngel, Phantom Thief Kaito, and Cat's Eye for examples. This is one of the few series that really sticks to the phantom thief theme, it stays being about thievery and trickery for its entire run (whereas most other shows get sidetracked by ... character drama.) Since it's a kid's show it can ignore a lot of reality that gets in the way. They can go anywhere in the world, use all kinds of crazy weird tech gizmos, and steal stuff without being weighed down by the consequences.

There’s a deeper arching plot line as well. By episode 5 we find out there is a dark backstory to the characters, so there is a bit of intrigue to pull in older viewers.

It's a fast paced story but it managed to make me like all the characters. All of the side characters get some background, almost all of them have at least 1 or 2 episodes devoted to developing their backstory and personalities. The main characters themselves have plenty of development and go through changes as the story progresses. Friendships and romances are tested and played with, so the story isn't too afraid of changing the status quo, but it IS an episodic storyline so any overarching development is slow.

Character designs are colorful, playful, and over-the-top. At first it can be a bit much, but the longer I watched the more it grew on me. Due to the fantastical art direction, they had a chance to draw some really stunning backdrops and fight scenes. While it might seem a bit childish with how vibrant it is, I really do think some of the scenes in this show are visually beautiful.

Now for as much as I love it there are still a few downsides:

* It is still a kids show, so it just doesn't go quite deep enough at some junctures. If you are watching this primarily for the dark drama, you will be a little disappointed.
* The explanations of gizmos/tools/science shown in-show have varying degrees of accuracy to real science. Some explanations are downright wrong, but this doesn't really impact the plot. (If you're watching this with kids, be prepared to re-explain some of this bad science haha.)
* There are a few side characters that can get annoying due to their repeated catchphrases and tendency towards shouting. Thankfully their screen time becomes less and less as the season goes on.
* In the beginning, our main character gets an 'apprentice' that is super annoying and whiny. But! The apprentice actually gets character development! By the end of the show he’s genuinely a character you like.

Great show, I really do love it. And bonus points for being set in modern day, and having our characters have cell phones and actually USE them!

(EDIT: Fixed a few autocorrect typos)