“Geez, women are so hard to understand” – Etsu Kusuda
Most, if not all male viewers tend to agree with that statement. The various male characters in Hatsukoi Limited (literally means first love limited) all experienced the same problem. But before you get the wrong idea, it should mentioned that this anime is directed from the female perspective most of the time. Hatsukoi Limited explores the early love life of a group of teenage girls and how they cope with boys that they like (or don’t like). While 12 episodes are hardly enough to cover any in depth relationship for over half a dozen girls, the story remains a highly enjoyable one. Simply put, Hatsukoi Limited is as close to an idealized slice of life / romance comedy one could find in the market now a day.
Complex love web is one of the main elements in the story. However, viewers will have no trouble adapting to the environment as everything build on one another slowly one step at a time. In fact, the overall plot to the story tags along quite well with each major character’s development. One could even say the characters are a natural complement to the story or vice versa (this may be a natural thing to say, but in reality not a lot of shows can even do this properly).
A well structured story must also have a logical order for presenting its characters and Hatsukoi Limited excel in this department as well, as previously mentioned. What most people worry about is the sudden rush of information in the early episodes (like just dumping all you need to know about all the characters in episode 1), but thankfully that is not the case for Hatsukoi Limited. In hindsight, starting the story with Ayumi was an obvious choice for the author although her character as a whole may not have been the easiest to accept by most audiences.
Viewers will enjoy watching most of the characters grow and develop themselves along the way. Most have gotten more mature and act more reasonably, but there are some exceptions. Whether the lack of character development for these characters are attributed to the length of the series or the story was meant to be that way, is up to viewers to decide. However, it should be pointed out that all the characters have a sense of realism in them, nothing from their characteristics seem fictitious or too fantasy-like. Through the eyes of these 14 to 16 years old, one might even see a resemblance of your own younger self.
Perhaps the most painful part of Hatsukoi Limited with regards to its characters is that, like most shounen shows out there, it has really wimpy, stupid, and annoying guys (to make matter worse, most of them look quite ugly too). On the other hand, the females characters are often really smart, kawaii, and gorgeous looking babes (yes Misaki, that means you)!
Quite frankly, it was the character animation that first caught my attention to this wonderful romance comedy as the storyline sounded rather generic to me at first. As to be expect from J.C. Staff, they always deliver high quality animation (and consistent too). The backgrounds are often lacking in detail, but that help put the characters in focus and viewers will spend 90% of the time looking at the characters anyway, thus there isn’t much to complain about. It was also interesting to see that the characters in the anime seem to be an exact carbon copy of their original manga self. Believe it or not, it is not easy to find an anime adaptation that follows the manga as closely as Hatsukoi Limited, both in the looks of the characters and the story itself.
Finally, music is THE area that surpirsed me the most throughout the show. First off, both OP and ED are just splendid. The additional BGM and soundtracks in between just amplifies whatever tiny emotion I had in my mind, making this series a bit more successful than it should have been in my eyes. I hope you will find Hatsukoi Limited as enjoyable as it did for me and it is definitely a series in which I plan to have a blu-ray collection of in the future.
Are you in love right now?
