Ranked #4849

Triangle Heart: Sweet Songs Forever

What originally attracted me to Triangle Heart was its relation to Magic Girl Nanoha. I was a big fan of Nanoha so I was looking forward to viewing this. I thought at first that this was just a spinoff staring the older brother and sister but I realized later that this series came first. Unfortunately it just didn’t live up to successor.

The main problem with Triangle Heart is that it is a series that doesn’t know what it wants to be. Is it a shounen style action series? Is it romance? A musical drama? Because it tries to be too many things it fails at everything. Besides sharing the same names and a few personality quirks it has almost nothing to do with Nanoha. Pretty much all of that series characters appear in some for albeit most extremely briefly. The series is just too short to do more than one thing. There are action scenes with sword battles and gun fights but there is nothing particularly inspired about them. There isn’t enough action to keep action fans interested. They try to bring in some romantic elements but those don’t work either because the series is to short and the characters too wooden and 2-dimensional to generate any interest in them.

The plot, to put it bluntly, is stupid. We start the show in England at a music academy. The new headmistress Fiasse, is a famous singer and is about to go on a world tour to raise money for a charity she is involved with and promote her school. She is being attacked by an unknown enemy and has to be protected by Ellis a highly skilled bodyguard and her team. I found it all pretty unbelievable and ridiculous. At this point Kyouya and Miyuki Takamachi appear, who are childhood friends and apparently ninjas. The major difference with them is that while in Nanoha series they are the older brother and sister of Nanoha, in this series they are cousins though raised as siblings. All four of the leads grew up together so they all have a shared history and a shared tragedy. Kyouya's father was killed protecting Fiasse's father years before from the same mysterious enemy. There is friction between Ellis and the two as she is resentful that they have been brought in and think that them using swords will be a liability and will only get them killed. (Can't say I wouldn’t agree with her there)

One thing that Triangle Heart shares with Nanoha is there are just too many characters. The plot (what little there is) is crushed under the weight of scores of meaningless supporting characters who bring nothing to the story. It tried to tell the story of four main characters but the series isn’t long enough to give any of them justice. Thus none of them are interesting nor do you care about what happens to them. I mentioned the cameos of many characters from Nanoha? Well the story would have been better off without them. The supreme example of this is the two girls from the cafe who are always fighting. Why? I couldn’t even tell you their names, just that one had green hair and the other blue. What exactly is your point?

The art and sound are very well done however. So from a visual standpoint there is a lot to like. Very adorable character designs and vibrant colors. The music is pretty good as well, the songs were performed by Kotoko, who is a favorite of mine. The voice acting is not as strong however.

I can’t recommend this series though. Even if you’re a big Nanoha fan this series is so different and pointless that you are just wasting your time with it. If you haven’t seen Nanoha go watch that instead, you can thank me later.

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5 WORDS OR LESS REVIEW : Just watch the Nanoha series.

Triangle Heart is another one of those series that could have been better. It definitely had some potential, but it wasn’t executed well.

I gave it a chance – I really did, but for the first two episodes felt like a chore to me. The last two got a bit better, and I realized it got better because the plot was more defined by then. I guess that’s it – the plot development was really slow, and since it was a 4 episode OVA (with limited time) I thought they should have defined the plot sooner.

I really did like the last two episodes. It got more exciting, especially with the fight scenes. I also like the conflict between using guns and swords, and why the main characters chose their paths. It’s almost as if it’s an anime version of the Hollywood movie The Bodyguard.

Speaking of characters, I can’t say I liked them a lot. They all lacked charisma – none of them was appealing enough. Also, there was a lot of characters, specially the ones who work at Midoriya(?) café. Most of them were there for providing fan service. All I could remember was Nanoha – she had her own series after all.

I didn’t know most of the voice actors for this anime. Hikaru Midorikawa was a familiar name, he played Tamahome in Fushigi Yuugi, one of my favorite series. I guess he did a good job of portraying Kyoya. Tomokazu Seki is another familiar name – he is my favorite male voice actor after all, but I didn’t notice it was him right away. His role wasn’t a main character role.

Art style reminded me of the original Kanon series, because the characters looked somewhat stubby, and I thought they all looked dowdy. I did like the background design though – As stand-alones, the backgrounds would really make nice watercolor paintings. Color coordination needed some improvement.

Because it is a music-themed anime, it has to have good music – and it does. KOTOKO did a good job in singing the opening and ending songs. I also noticed that for a 4 episode OVA, it had a lot of insert songs which were all pop and cutesy.

To end my review, I have to say that the Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha series made a really good spin-off of this OVA. You don’t have to watch this to understand the Nanoha series, but it’s fun to recognize the characters from the OVA. Finally, it’s not bad, but it’s not good either. read more