Review of Love Hina

"Your experience in reality may differ"

Any fan of anime worth their salt knows this series, and with good reason. Created originally by Ken Akamatsu, a mangaka well-known for harem plots, Love Hina was developed into an anime series by Xebec in 2000. Both the manga and anime have proven immensely popular, and Love Hina is widely considered to set the standard in harem anime. Honestly, I can see why. It’s original, fun and best of all, has actually relatable humour. Before you all balk at the concept of decent and dare I say, good harem anime, let me discuss the plot, characters, obvious pitfalls of the genre and the reasons why this Harem is actually worth half a look.

Introducing our protagonist, Keitaro Urashima. To keep a promise he made with a girl fifteen years ago, Keitaro is attempting to get a place in the prestigious university Tokyo U. to keep said promise. As a main character, Keitaro fits the bill relatively nicely, for a harem anime anyways. He’s portrayed at first as pathetic, everyday guy who, let’s be fair, we all can relate to just a little. He is struggling to get a place at Tokyo (for the third time, no less), when he just happens to come across a miracle in the form of an all girls’ dorm that he gets dragged into running. A very sarcastic eyebrow rose from me at this premise but oddly as a premise, it works, as soon as the rest of the cast are introduced. Each of them is  very distinctive and well rounded for anime characters, making them likeable in the sense that they aren’t just blow up dolls with varying hair and eye colours.

Let me introduce just one of six females in this series, Kaolla Su. Her particular brand of  kookiness I can really only equate to that of Ed from Cowboy Bebop and even then she’s pretty incomparable to any character I’ve seen in any fiction. Imagine feeding a lemur a packet of sugar, standing back and watching the results. Kaolla is a literal rollercoaster on screen, fast, furious and nonstop, constantly bouncing around with her various and sometimes downright terrifying inventions. Just take the first ten seconds of her introduction, which includes ten miniature tanks and two explosions. In an already bizarre scene, Su attempts to stop Keitaro from running rampage in the house with these mini tanks, nearly killing him the process. Well I guess you need to introduce her somehow.

"Giving sixteen year old's advanced military equipment, 

what could possibly go wrong?"

Even with this kookiness, she does get character development however, and we see different aspects of Kaolla, emerging as the plot progresses, makes her, I daresay, a little complex and even three dimensional. While not all the characters in this series are as “special” as Su, others such as Motoko, Kitsune and Mutsumi all have individual personalities and quirks that make them interesting and very likeable. In fact I don’t think there’s a character I dislike in this series, bar the annoying twitterfuck called Sara who clearly has daddy issues.

Plot-wise, Lova Hina has been criticized as being repetitive and disjointed, criticism I can understand. General episode outline varies from from “we go to point A to point B” to “girls somehow end up in bath-house”. This is overall what the episodes entail however – the themes and actions are what makes these stories genuinely interesting. I would almost step a toe over into calling Love Hina “Fantasy” as the outrageous action is really out of this world. At one point, a dragon is on the receiving end of a megaton punch and a flying turtle features in the cast of minor characters.  As a result, I’d hesitate to go so far as to put this anime into the Fantasy genre, but the outlandish action really does make a mountain out a molehill and is mostly there to emphasize the comedy. The action is funny, original, and catches and holds your attention, which is a serious achievement considering the current reputation of Harem animes.

Love Hina does have one major flaw however, that being the use of the same gags over and over again. Two episodes into this anime it becomes obvious that the main running gag of this series is that Keitaro is the official sole punching bag of Japan. Accordingly, he gets punched into oblivion on a regular basis, sometimes due to misunderstandings but more often just because he’s in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is entertaining the first time, perhaps the second time, but when the exact same situation involving Keitaro, a fist, and a “world of hurt” emerges at episode fifteen, we’re into broken tape-player territory. This is made even worse by the fact that the joke wasn’t really funny to begin with. Yes, anime, it is mindlessly funny when a character is punched, please do not use it as the only source of humour in an entire episode, it stopped being original fifteen episodes back.

"Oh anime, u so original."

Despite it flaws though, Love Hina is really a decent anime, despite being a harem. Though the manga is famed for being “ecchi” in the sense that there are tits and ass everywhere, the anime really downplays this, surprisingly focusing more on the drama and plot, The animation is pretty standard for its time, but not an eyesore. The character designs are original, and each is unique in their own way. Best of all, the music is ridiculously catchy and fun in tune to the series. Yes I’m listening to it right now. And no I won’t stop.

Going to give this a solid “WATCHABLE”.

Review of Futakoi

“Straight Man refuses Orgy with Several Sets of Twins, Police still questioning why.”

Futakoi was originally a light novel and visual novel series being adapted by the little-known Telecom Animation Film studios. Nozuma Futami, our hero, and I use that term loosely, moves into a new town to live with his aunt and cousins because his father has taken a job in another country. The town has a disproportionately large number of identical female twins in the population, whether by pure co-incidence, or for mystical reasons. There is, of course, a local legend involving a mystical stone, a pair of female twins and unrequited love. Naturally, Nozuma quickly finds himself the centre of attention of the entire town, including no less than six of the several sets of twin girls. Your standard harem them, times two, but hold your horses, this is not something to celebrate.

I won’t put it lightly; this anime is one of the worst I’ve watched. The characters are boring, the plot is predictable and the editing dices together about as smoothly as onions and banana in the same bowl.

Just to give some background, the only reason I watched this in the first place is that while I was in France, it was the only thing on my hard-drive besides stupid amounts of Family Guy and Simpsons for my brothers. So Superman help me, I watched it twice in a row out of sheer boredom. The sheer-cliff-face kind of boredom inspired by having nothing to do, and probably worsened by this anime.

Clearly, the creators thought that by having twin girls instead of just, well girls in their plot they were being hip and original. Thing is, I hesitate to call these sets of twins, well sets of twins. Save for two particular sets of twins, these identical twins are literal mirror images of each other in personality, attitude and looks. They might as well be clones. Well, either that or moe girls have started reproducing asexually (Superman help us).

Don’t get me wrong, identical in every sense of the word twins are endearing, but please not four sets in one series; it just reeks of lazy character design and poor direction. Need over ten girls in your harem but too lazy to come up with more than ten different hair colours? Never fear, just make them all twins, you don’t even have to worry about different personalities!

I won’t name all of the twins; they’re all pretty forgettable in their own way, but one set I’ll particularly point out, the Sakurazi twins.

This pair is downright creepy. They walk, talk and even dress identically, except for their differently coloured hair ties. On top of that, they both fall hopelessly in love with Nozuma, because you know, he’s just that attractive. What’s even weirder about it is that they don’t see each other as rivals; rather, they’re just one amorphous blob attempting to get into Nozuma’s pants together.

"ARGH THEY'RE MUTIPLYI-MPH!!"

Nozuma’s reaction to this is even more astounding. Instead of a general reaction of “awesome, both twin girls in love with me?” He doesn’t even have the nice guy reaction of “Oh god, both twins are in love with me, what do I do without hurting both?!”. Nozuma’s reaction instead is, and I quote, “Okay.” Maybe I’m missing details here, but when you have a situation like this, it’s not simply “okay”, this a potential threesome for superman’s sake, Nozuma, man up, grab your balls and jump into the hijinks. Or at the very least pick one of the twins, don’t lead them to believe you’ll eventually marry them both in a situation deserving of an MTV documentary.

Nozumas’ relationships with the rest of the girls are pretty much according to this pattern to be perfectly honest. They all seem to instantly fall for Nozuma, despite his being a very average guy. Each set of twins, like the Sakurazi’s, seem intent on bedding Nozuma together, not separately. Now I’m aware that Harem Anime is focused on the impossible, girls falling in love with the average everyday guy so that Japan’s Otaku Population don’t give up all hope in dating the K-ON cast. But both sides in the Twin pair falling in love just seems beyond cosmic possibility, especially considering what an unlikeable droll bastard Nozuma is. Amazingly, only one pair of twins, the generic childhood friends, come into conflict with each-other because of this and even then it’s not used to its full advantage. The plot does have potential for conflict with close pairs of twins, but it just brushes over this and attends yet another beach party, which honestly gets on my tits a bit despite the fact the premise doomed it from the beginning.

 "Trust me Nozuma, we're confused too..."

Speaking of plot... Like most animes based on a Visual Novels, the plot revolves around basic episodic story telling with an over-arching plot lurking in the background. Episodes include: the girls and Nozuma go to the beach, the girls and Nozuma go to a mansion, and the girls and Nozuma go to the mall. All the while Nozuma desperately tries to juggle these relationships, because naturally, all of the emotionally unstable females break down in tears whenever they see him with another set of twins. The plot eventually climaxes into an explanation for all of the twin girls and their heartbreak, wise words from the sexy aunt, and something about the Sakurazi Moe Blob leaving town.

This all might have been interesting if it weren’t for Nozuma as the protagonist. While the actual drama is happening, Nozuma goes through what I can only describe as a mid-life crisis with his dramatic realization of just how illegal polygamy is. Refusing to man up and deal with the issues he created in the first place, he falls back on his other option – being a whingy tool. It’s only during the last episode that he finally and literally mans up and actually engages with the plot. Which means before this we’re left to watch Nozuma bitch and whine with a few snapshots back to the actual, you know, interesting drama.

The animation and music are on the same level as the plot; generic and poorly thought out. I can forgive a show somewhat for a bad plot and bad character design if it has nice animation and music but not in this case. The animation is very basic, there’s nothing surprising or new about it. There are little to no action scenes so mostly we get scenes of characters sitting around and talking. Perhaps walking is about as dramatic as it’ll ever get bar one or two scenes where they – gasp – ride a bike. Character designs as I mentioned before are lazy, not necessarily bad, but much like the animation, nothing memorable. The background music has even less to be said about it – it sounds like it was entirely composed and performed by Keyboard Cat and no, that is not a compliment.

"For a cat, you have to admit it's a pretty good score..."

One thing I’ll grudgingly admit though is that I did like the opening. The music was catchy and was probably the only reason I stuck with this horrible series. Beyond that, there is nothing saving this series  Boring plot, bad character design, more than creepy character interactions. It wasn’t just that this anime made me want to write scathing letters to a certain author of a certain light novel series. I was absolutely bored out of my skull watching it. Beyond that, I didn’t want to watch them prance across the badly drawn backgrounds to the choppy keyboard music. There are far better harems you can indulge in. Rating a solid

UNWATCHABLE.