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Sep 29, 2024
I'll try to keep this short and to the point.
Pros:
- Beautiful, movie-level animation
- Excellent VA work
- A somewhat fresh take on the subject of high-school romantic comedies, showing us a point of view we've haven't seen much before
- Loveable, unconventional heroines (in a good way)
- Does not reduce people, including romantic rivals to clichés, almost everyone of significance is portrayed as a complex (if not necessarily realistic) character
- Despite the MC's somewhat depressing worldview and narration, the overall message of the show feels positive and uplifting, demonstrating how people can find happiness and friendship even in emotionally trying times.
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Cons:
- While it tackles subjects related to romantic comedies, it does not really feel like one. (Though this might not be a bad thing, depending on one's preferences.) The titular losing heroines spend more time recovering from their rejections than looking for anyone new.
- The three heroines don't get equal amounts of screen time and development. Komari is my favorite of the three, but I still feel her arc was one episode longer than it needed to be. In contrast, Anna's character felt painfully underdeveloped overall.
- Character development itself is a hit-and-miss, feeling like smoke and mirrors at times. We definitely see the three girls taking important steps in their lives, but the exact changes in their outlook can be hard to pin down.
- Not the worst, but also certainly not the best ever male lead: he's no self-insert or pathetic doormat, but his own complexes and pessimism can make him feel annoying or worse still, stubborn in his foolishness at times, despite his good intentions.
- The usual light novel adaptation curse: the show does not really get to any meaningful conclusion, it simply ends. Future seasons (here's hoping) might rectify this problem along with a few mentioned above.
I'm a nitpicker, so of course I wrote more about the cons than the pros, but make no mistake: if the above leaves you on the fence, I wholeheartedly recommend giving this series a try.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Sep 13, 2024
I know I shouldn't be judging the author based on their works (and vice versa), but I fear for Negi's sanity. Having read all the currently available chapters in a few days, I am honestly shocked by how it became more and more brutal, pessimistic, cynical and depressing. Especially the IRA arc - yeesh, I hope Negi's okay. After that ended, things were starting to look up a little, but now we're back where we started: frustrating, somewhat pointless-feeling battles that are simply not fun to read.
Not because they aren't well-drawn or anything. Well, the pacing's hella slow, but it's not slow enough to be
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terrible. It's just that there are mainly two kinds of battles in Sentai Daishikkaku: those where both sides are filled with such idiots and/or assholes that you don't want either side to win, or occasionally, those precious few likable characters are pummeling each other and you don't want anyone to get hurt. Neither is exactly entertaining.
The MC is "interesting", because he qualifies for both of the above, weirdly enough. It's certainly an accomplishment to have a manga where the main character sometimes feels like the hero of the story and other times the villain, and this can change almost from one scene to the next, but the price Negi pays for this is that his character development is just all over the place. The MC's goals are increasingly hard to pin down, which may be intentional to a degree, but at the same time, he's nonetheless stubborn about them to the point of stupidity and self-sabotage. It's hard to root for him either like this.
After the Quintessential Quintuplets, the hacked-together plot is also depressing to witness. There are flashes of Negi's earlier brilliance and planning here and there for some plotlines, but largely, you get the feeling that he's writing the story by the seat of his pants, changing directions from one chapter to the next on occasion. Even the character writing, which I think is one of Negi's greatest strengths, isn't at all consistent: he regularly warps characterizations to make them fit the current story direction. What kind of character is Hisui? Or Chidori? Or Usukobo? It's hard for me to say, despite having read 150+ chapters of this manga. It's sad.
As much as I wanted to like Negi's new work, I honestly feel strangely relieved having reached the (current) end of the series and have little motivation to follow it further. It's probably not for me, but I think it's objectively not that good, either. 4/10, dropped.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Feb 26, 2024
How to kill most interest in your otherwise promising series in 7 easy steps:
- Decide to portray no more than around 14 manga chapters' worth of material in a single anime season
- Start strong, spend the first few episodes on meaningful plot and character development
- Realize that you have next to nothing left to show and you're not even at halfway point in the cour
- Start padding out episodes, draw out scenes as much as you can, make the characters retread the same topic over and over again, try to delay the actual confrontation with the antagonists as much as possible
- Realize that you simply
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can't draw things out even more at this point, but you're still merely at two-thirds of the season
- As a last-ditch effort to fill up the remaining episodes, start a multi-episode flashback arc that features no more than one single character of the main cast (not the MC of course), with next to no stakes as the events portrayed therein have been discussed in previous episodes already
- Realize that most of your fans have already fled, congratulate yourself for a job well done
I'm rating this a 5 because the actual story is great. Go read the manga if you're interested. It's the adaptation that is... revolting.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Nov 3, 2023
Beautifully animated utter nonsense.
Make no mistake, I absolutely enjoy many of the themes "Pluto" spends much of its runtime on. The "humanity" of robots, the meaning of "family", the vicious cycle of hatred - the show (and likely the original manga) has a lot of interesting things to say about them, and if you can turn off your brain (not unlike how the robots in the show can take out their "artificial intelligence" units from their bodies), you can definitely enjoy what it has to offer. The gorgeous visuals certainly help as well.
Unfortunately, the show requires way more willing suspension of disbelief than I can
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give it, to the point that I feel that its writing is an insult towards the viewers' intelligence. The plot doesn't really advance - instead, "things happen", then some other "things happen", and finally the show just stops. (No, seriously, the ending is jarringly abrupt.) There are a few interesting twists here and there, but they feel utterly unearned, because the events leading up to them tend to seem so incoherent and nonsensical. Many of the characters' decisions make no sense, or go against what has been revealed to them mere minutes ago. Everything is subordinated to "where the story needs to go", regardless of whether that direction fits what's been established about the characters or the setting. And sadly, this only gets worse the closer we get to the end.
Many people here seem ecstatic because of the visuals and the overall "hate is bad" message, but I think this show would have worked so much better if there was an actual, working plot to underpin it all. Such a good-looking, meaningful series deserved better than this.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Nov 15, 2022
If I had to describe this manga in two words, those would be "immensely frustrating". Basically everything, from the premise to the plot and the characters are precisely engineered to draw the story out as much as humanly possible. On the flip side, the art is great - but that, in itself, is not enough to make the series enjoyable.
The premise, while a bit silly, is not so bad that you can't simply roll with it. On the other hand, the "practice marriage" setup offers an ideal breeding ground for misunderstandings: people are expected to act like a married couple without actually being married or
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even in love, so time and again, the question is raised whether their behavior shows genuine attraction or just a desire to get good grades.
The characters face similar problems. They can't be honest with their feelings, ever. In this school, confessing to someone is apparently forbidden, or looked down upon, or whatever, because they just refuse to do it, period. Then again, maybe even a straight-up confession would not help either, as most characters, but especially the male lead, have such immense self-loathing that they dismiss every sign of romantic attraction from another party as a misunderstanding on their part. Again and again and again.
Indeed, this would not be so horrible if one did not get the feeling that they are reading the same thing over and over again. The plot does move forward (at a glacial pace, unsurprisingly), but despite that, the dynamics between the main characters mostly remain the same - as in, constant sexual tension and supposed "misunderstandings" that never really go anywhere.
But, well, at least it looks good. The art is, again, genuinely nice. So if you are looking for fanservice with cute girls, this manga might be up your alley. If you want an enjoyable romantic story, you may want to look elsewhere. I know I will.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Dec 12, 2021
This review contains minimal spoilers.
This is what happens when you write a mystery without having any idea about the solution whatsoever. Have to give props to the writer for trying hard to pretend they had everything planned from the start - but honestly, there's only so many out-of-left-field twists you can pull before it becomes obvious that you're writing by the seat of your pants.
But maybe I'm being too hard on the authors here. Many do this and the story can still remain enjoyable regardless. However, in this case, they've become so desperate for a twist that they actually threw the likable male lead out
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of the story, replaced him with an utterly boring, unpleasant, brooding jerk (who is another personality in the same body), and then basically made every single other character a psycho.
Too bad, because the art is beautiful, and the first arc was brilliant. After that, however, it has gone totally off the deep end. So, so disappointing. :(
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Nov 30, 2021
The fact that this manga is popular is proof that gender double standards are not going anywhere anytime soon.
Mona, the not-so-slightly narcissistic "queen bee" of her high school cannot stand the fact that the new transfer student, Medaka is not swooning over her like everyone else. So she decides to make him fall for her, no matter what. Obviously, since this is a romance manga, she ends up falling for him first instead, but her motivation (at least as far as she'll admit) remains nothing more than to satisfy her own ego.
Medaka, on the other hand is not immune to her charms because he's dense,
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like so many other male leads. He's not even immune at all, he's just holding himself back - he is training to be a monk, and that means he is forbidden from having romantic relationships. As far as we can tell, he's choosing that lifestyle of his own free will.
Of course Mona does not know this, but it's doubtful that she'd care even if she did. No matter how many times Medaka tells her that he doesn't want to hang out with her, she doesn't back off - and her attempts at seduction can get rather physical at times. But wait, that's not all! Medaka's classmates actually chew him out for being "mean" towards their beloved idol, and force him to at least be on friendly terms with her whether he wants to or not.
While the manga is rather self-conscious about Mona's narcissism and less-than-pure motives, she still gets away with pretty much anything - and the more I read, the more that bothered me, because, let's face it, what she's doing is basically textbook sexual harassment. But she's a girl, so it's apparently okay. Yaaay.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Apr 25, 2019
Toradora is a show that starts off fantastically, then around the middle it begins to falter and finally by the end of the series it dives head-first into the pavement.
In my opinion, the characters and their interactions carry this show. All main characters are fairly complex, and part of the series' appeal is how we find out more and more about what makes them tick, and watch their personalities evolve. Both work incredibly well initially, later much less so, as "evolution" is replaced by sudden, inexplicable change, and much of the interaction from the first half simply... disappears. We'll get back to this later on,
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but first allow me a few words on the individual characters themselves.
Taiga is a terrible human being. I'm not sure I'd want a friend like her, not to mention a girlfriend. But she is still portrayed as Human, her behavior has reasons behind it, and you can tell that in her own way she does treasure those who manage to put up with her attitude and temper. She's really interesting because while I don't especially like her, I can still clearly see why others would think otherwise.
Ryuuji is a great guy, but is honestly a bit of a doormat. This allows him to get close to Taiga early in the series, but his lack of agency also becomes aggravating quickly. I've lost count how many times another character talked to him at length, and all he managed to spit out in reply was "well", "I" or "wait" before the other person turned around and left. And he didn't mind. Thankfully this passiveness of his does get better with time, and his character arc is perhaps the only one in the series that is unaffected by the nosedive happening in the second half. On the comedic side, he's a great "boke" (look up "tsukkomi" if you don't know what that means) and his obsession with cleaning adds numerous fun moments to the show.
Kitamura and Minori, the crushes of the above two leads at the start of the series, also serve their roles quite well.
Kitamura acts a bit like an older brother to the others, while the fact that he'd known Taiga longer than Ryuuji (and the audience) adds a bit more mystery to his character. His arc is also the one that completes the earliest, before the show really starts going downhill, and the end of it is really satisfying. Unfortunately, the creators visibly had no idea what to do with him afterwards, and he pretty much disappears from the plot from then on.
Minori is your typical "genki girl" on the surface, but as the series progresses it starts unveiling a lot more depth to her character, until... nothing happens, sadly. Minori's arc suffers greatly from the events of the second half, and we only catch glimpses of what could have been. She's still a lot better off than Ami, though.
Who's Ami? Glad you asked. Ami, Kitamura's childhood friend, is introduced as something of a wild card to the love polygon of the previous four. She has the outsider's point of view on many of the group's problems, which adds a new dynamic to their interaction; her character is both like and unlike Taiga in many aspects, with great flaws, but also numerous redeeming qualities and signs of gradually changing for the better. Then the second half starts... and her arc is almost completely abandoned, to the point that you have to wonder what she was actually supposed to be doing in the series at all. She easily has the most wasted potential in the show.
So what was actually happening in the second half of the series that has me up in arms to such an extent? On the surface, nothing much. Toradora did what many other, wildly successful shows did before and after it: started raising the stakes, and putting more emphasis on drama instead of comedy. Nothing wrong with that. The real problem is that while the series' success in comedy was largely due to the well-crafted characters listed above, for whatever reason it tried to be successful at drama while sidelining many of the main cast and warping some of those that still retained the spotlight.
Taiga was unrecognizable for much of the second half. At first, she at least had an excuse for acting differently around the Christmas arc, but afterwards... she simply stopped being herself. I was shocked myself when I realized that I'd actually prefer the violent Taiga to make a return instead of... well, words fail me to describe what that was. One thing is for sure: this was not character development. Character development does not work like this; someone's personality does not change drastically from one episode to the next, with little warning or reason. I suspect the intention was to earn some sympathy points for her by making her look more vulnerable, but they kind of threw out the baby with the bathwater.
Kitamura, Minori and Ami, on the other hand, were barely present. As I wrote above, the writers simply had no idea what to do with Kitamura by that point, while Minori and Ami were sacrificed for the sake of the drama: Minori actively avoided everyone else for about 10 episodes, while Ami's role was reduced to making passive-aggressive comments at anyone who dared to approach her, then storming off shortly after.
You simply can't have an effective plot and believable drama with only the two remaining characters, especially with Taiga only being a shadow of her former self. It just doesn't work.
The ending? Can't really say much without going into spoilers, but I'll just leave this here: the series covered the events of 10 light novel volumes overall, but the last volume was only covered by the final episode and half of the penultimate one. Draw your own conclusions.
What went wrong? In my opinion, Toradora suffers from the usual pacing issues that adaptations of longer-running titles tend to experience, but the core of its problems were not introduced by the adaptation itself and stem from the source material. They say you don't realize what you have until it's gone - perhaps the light novel author did not realize the secret to her series until she effectively blasted apart everything that made it work? Or perhaps I'm not being fair, since it's not like everyone hated the series' conclusion - so let's just say that it did not work for me, to put it mildly.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Dec 1, 2017
I'm not sure if this is actually an adaptation, but "Kimi no Koe wo Todoketai" sure feels like one. You can almost see before your mind's eye the numerous subplots cut and character development missed during the film's roughly 90 minutes of runtime. It feels like a small slice of a much bigger whole, trying to do much but ultimately accomplishing little.
The story has way too many characters, and thus most of them remain largely undeveloped. Their personalities and roles can be described in a single sentence. Heck, the girl with the pigtails seems to serve absolutely no purpose aside of serving cookies to the
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others and being shy. The plot itself also seems to go in way too many directions for its own good, attempting to juggle numerous plot threads at once (just to name a few: the comatose mother in the hospital, the estranged childhood friends, the amateur radio station, the main protagonist's plans for the future), but ultimately not giving most of them the time and attention they deserve.
The art style is... let's say minimalistic. It was hard to tell at times whether I was watching a series or an actual film; if this actually had a significantly bigger budget compared to you everyday anime, they didn't do much with it. It surprises me, because I tend to associate the Madhouse studio with higher quality.
That said, the film is not at all unwatchable. It's more like a "cute trainwreck"; the overall message and content is generally fun and heartwarming, but behind it all seems to hide a one-cour series or OVA that would have had enough room to do this concept justice, and which never actually got made.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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