That's what I would really had liked to say because of the first impression this anime gave me. It has all the elements that make it look like your typical harem - slice of life - high school anime. It even has all of the archetypical characters, and most of them have to be female, of course. However, this anime achieves a lot more than what you might think.
The setup is a rather large private school, composed of about 9999 (or all of the 9's you can imagine for a single number) students, and thus, the student council is taken pretty seriously. You could say that the students themselves are the ones who rule this academy. It's kind of an utopic school, where the democracy has a huge roll and it's executed perfectly.
Enter our main character, Yuuki Ojima: A rather lazy student who attends to this school and belongs to the "food research" club that does virtually nothing more than eating. He belongs to it just because there's something that tells him that he must be in a club, and of course, to be with his childhood friend, Chisato Sumiyoshi.
As the student council gets serious about clubs literally wasting and throwing money away in order to keep doing nothing, our main characters and the rest of the club decide to protect it, and the only way is that one of them becomes the council student president.
As our main character becomes more and more popular every time because of the elections, he starts to realize that there's a lot more to do than saving his own club. He starts to develop selfless-ness, and he becomes some sort of a pro-active guy, caring about what happens around him, leaving his laziness behind. And this is where the well executed drama (specially with his childhood friend, Chisato) begins.
I never thought I'd say this about an anime, but there's a honorable mention that I want to give to the comedy aspect. which was not abused nor it was totally absent either. Somehow they put this when the times were right and it helps you release some tension that the story builds up as it progresses. It just comes naturally, and even if you dont think it's funny, it helps you to recover your pace and catch some air. Alright i'm exaggerating :D
I give the story a solid 8, as it has different "areas" where it develops itself, but it does in a pretty convincing fashion, without losing any of its focus.
I would say 12 episodes weren't enough, as the development kind of required some more depth to it. However, I think pretty much everything was very well executed plot-wise. Nothing was rushed nor over-extended either.
The characters, as I mentiones before, are nothing that blow your imagination away, for they are these archetypical characters. However, the characters' development is notably one of the strong point of this anime. It was really good to see these people not hesitating to take mature decisions to support the ones they care about, as well as leaving some stuff about their regretable past behind. When you start do develop some sort of love/hate relationship with one or more characters, that's the moment you will know they were well executed and have an impact.
The art in this anime was ok. it reminded me a lot of Amagami SS, specially on the characters design (although this aspect is a little more exagerated in Koi to Senkyo). Everything was pleasant to see and is well detailed too.
When it comes to the sound, i found it awesome for an anime of this type. I was really immersed into the general feeel and atmosphere of each scene because of the background music solely. It really invites you to become one with the plot.
Voice acting was also good enough. Not outstanding, but it was well done for my taste. Emotions were convincing.
I would say that I enjoyed this wayy much mure than I thought I would, even if the three first episodes were full of "OMFG not this again". If it catches you from that moment, you will not be able to stop it. Even tho some of the arcs were over the top, it made me experience a lot of empathy towards the characters. I recommend you to give this one a try and see where it takes you :D
