Ranked #73

Junjou Romantica

So since no one has gotten a chance to review this anime I guess I will do the honors of being the first. I stumbled upon this anime while searching for random videos of youtube and I have to say I never expected it to be as good as it turned out to be. I just cannot stop watching this anime its completely and utterly addictive. Sorry this isnt going to be very dramatic and new york times like.

Story:
Definitely a yaoi girls(or guys) dream. The story is filled of 3 main plots all involving 3 different couples. There is the teddy bear obsessed writer dating the younger brother of his best friend. The loner intelligent associate professor dating the student, and the divorced husband dating the brother in law. All stories giving something that puts this anime together. This anime shows how pure love is and how it is unexpected. Not to mention yaoi galore. Be prepared to watch tons of sex scenes.

Art:
I think the art is pretty good. A little different from what I'm use to seeing and definitely different in a good way. I've seen better but it passes the test. It seems to capture the love scenes without making it too *cough* explicit.

Sound:
The opening is alright I suppose. And the music during the show isnt that memorable.

Character:
Character development in this anime is extremely face paced. But there is never a moment in which you dont know how a certain character is feeling, but it also leaves openings for surprises and turns.

Enjoyment:
As I said at the beginning this anime is absolutely addiciting. I can sit and watch it all day. The stories that are told are touching and show how love can exist in the most unexpected and different ways. It also has its comedic moments which dont fail to make me laugh, and it is extremely hard to make me laugh.

This anime no matter how much it reminds me of gravitation is definitely worth the watch. Just make sure there arent any children in the room ;) read more

You always remember your first love, and this is a theme that the romantic comedy Junjou Romantica endears for its duration.

Junjou Romantica actually follows three stories, each with very similar set-ups, similar outcomes, but with very different journeys to get there. The first is about a teenager who falls in love with his brother's best friend, the second follows an older, spurned, embittered young man who meets a guy who changes his life, and the third is a little more controversial story of a grown man who is being pursued by his ex-wife's much younger brother.

All of the stories are about men who admire, fall in love with and have sexual relations with other men. It's an anime about all of their first times with the loves of their lives. If you don't like that sort of story, then I have to tell you, you're watching the wrong anime already.

The weak points were that some of the stories weren't terribly unique, and most of the time, they were predictable or far too similar to one another. However, the winning point is the plot direction. HOW the story is told is well-done, sadly, the stories being told are little more than mediocre. Also, most of the anime was spent watching the characters get into rough sexual encounters with one another. If that was supposed to be erotic or emotional, it certainly lost steam after seeing it happen nearly every damn episode, sometimes more than once.

The art was a weak point for me in the anime. I was expecting some great character design and some decent animation, however, I received neither. Sometimes the characters had a very blocky jawline or they were disproportioned. The younger characters notably looked far better then the older ones. Yet this brings me to another problem with the art: half the characters looked the same. There were two characters in particular that I kept thinking was the same person until I realised that they were different. Despite this, there was some good use of bright, pastel colours, which gave the anime a more uplifting, vibrant look.

And here's my grouse: I couldn't bring myself to like the OP or ED theme songs, and I also thought that the background music (BGM) was significantly weak at points when it should have been particularly strong, like the emotional scenes.

Problems with the discrepancy with their looks aside, there were some decent characters in this anime. They were certainly more developed as the story progressed, which I was thankful for because I feared that they would remain stagnant or stick with the "seme/uke" characterisations throughout the entire series. There's a lot of digging deep with the character's thoughts and emotions, and they each have their little quirks and specialties. Somehow I felt, though, that their personalities were too predictable at times, too simple. Really, it is only through summing up the entire series and some excellent flashback material that we get some more detailed characterisations. The couple interactions are also interesting to watch.

Now, here's the tricky part--there were so many technical problems I had with this anime, yet I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's just something about Junjou Romantica that will warm you up towards it. Sort of like a used book that has story you will like: it has a shabby cover, some of the pages are missing, but you open it up and you get totally absorbed by what you read.

What I really admired about the anime is that it dealt with sexual situations as well as romantic issues. The sex scenes were actually very... pretty, if you will allow me to say. There isn't anything graphic, and I think the beauty of it was that you see two people who love one another bring each other pleasure in a physical way that isn't lewd or explicit.

I can certainly tell any fan of yaoi to go out and see this--it is definitely worth your time. For anyone who likes romance, Junjou Romantica is a decent anime geared more towards the more emotional aspects and the sexual side of relationships. read more