Reviews

First off, this anime screams Hideaki Anno. Just the style and the characters are so unique and complex (well most of them). The strongest point of this anime is it's characters, they don't follow tropes and all have very unique personalities. The MC Yukino is an incredibly vain high school girl who feeds off the praise of her peers. She wears a "mask" at school and hides her true personality with kindness and humility, she's at the top of her class and is looked upon by the faculty and students as a model student. Arima is in a similar situation where he hides his true personality, but not just at school, he hides it from his family and even from himself. When Yukino and Arima start going out they change as people for the better. And that's one of the reasons I love this anime, the MCs' start going out not even half way through the series, and the entire show is about their relationship between themselves and their friends grow. I'll repeat that I love that the supporting characters don't follow modern anime tropes; there's no tsundere or loli, they're all unique and have interesting backstories. It's too bad we don't get to see many of their characters develop through the show since in Hideaki's fashion the show ran out of budget. The show even ended partway through a story arc. You can see that in some scenes they'd severely cut the animation quality, it got bad enough to a point where one episode was animated purely with paper puppets. The background crowds were just left uncolored, there are a lot of examples of budget cuts throughout the show but in some cases I felt that it helped create a unique style that focused solely on the characters. One of my favorite things about the anime is the use of the opening song throughout the show as its' soundtrack. The instruments would change, the tempo and the key would as well. It was really interesting seeing one song be used to set so many different moods in the show. In the end this is one of my favorite anime of all time, probably my favorite shojou. It's just too bad it got cut short and ran into budget issues. I'd highly recommend everyone too watch it if you want to see something a bit different.