Maison Ikkoku

Don't see a ton of middling reviews here so I'll give my take but try to keep it short by listing my main issues with the show and elaborating on them.

The pacing: Sometime in the first few episodes Godai proclaims his love for Kyoko at the top of his lungs, but then the show treats these early episodes as if they had never happened, and the characters are unsure about each others' feelings for another 5 years. The characters will seemingly make progress, then the show will act as if the progress doesn't exist.

Character Consistency: The minor characters definitely experience personality change as the show ... goes on. In the beginning they take a bigger role, with the show highlighting the interactions of all people at the house, whereas later they seem to become one-dimensional and take a back seat to the featured romance. They each revert to their main traits, Yotsuya likes to mooch food, Akemi likes to party and is a "wordly" woman, Ichinose is a drunk who loves to party. At some point during the middle of the series, Yotsuya speaks very poetically, but they sort have seemed to drop that character trait as the show went on. Very much was made about how Akemi wore indecent clothing around the apartment and jokes were made about Godai's "desire" for her, but these were mostly dropped, as well as the partial nudity being removed from the show. Kentaro's screen time basically becomes non-existent as the show goes on.

Godai: He is at times insufferably dense and timid. I get that part of the point of the show is getting into funny misunderstandings, but by the 50th time you just want to scream for the guy to stand up for himself and say what he really means.

Kozue Relationship: What was up with this? I mean they clearly have zero chemistry, never touch or show even a hint of affection for each other, but somehow they are "dating" for years. Also they "break up" and you assume that Godai sort of had ended things off screen, as there is an episode regarding this. She then essentially disappears from the show for probably 25 episodes (possibly a year or more in the show's timeline) then reappears out of nowhere, trying to get married to Godai just to throw a wrench in things. The show even mentions how they had gone without talking for so long.

The first 20 episodes: Frankly the first 20 episodes are so are quite bad. Maybe I just hadn't gotten used to the show yet, but I was very very close to dropping the show at this point when it started to pick up a little.

While I touched on mostly the negatives, overall the show was enjoyable and worth watching if you like a rom com. It's at times pretty wholesome and seeing Godai grow is enjoyable.

The show has its charm, not an entire waste of time. It's certainly a throwback to simpler, more innocent times in more than one regard. However, there was so much buildup for such little payout. The show is just too slow, you get to care about the characters after a while but if you take away the episodes that revolve around some retarded "misunderstanding", which is just the author not being very creative/smart on that particular chapter, you could have cut the total number of episodes by half.

** SPOILERS AHEAD **
What was more disappointing was that they chickened out when tackling the fundamental conflict ... of the series: who was going to be Kyoko's choice, Mitaka or Godai? Well, we'll never know because the author decided to "solve" that issue by using one of the aforementioned retarded "misunderstandings" to take Mitaka out of the running. We knew she was more fond of Godai, no mystery there, but the author seemed determined to not allow Kyoko to make an actual decision. Writing out the entire conflict using such a dumb plot device as the one they used was the lazy way out, especially after people have dedicated so much time to this series. The other outcome they tentatively explored wasn't that much better either (and equally lazy) which was making Mitaka out to be a big date rape monster, placing him out of the running by default. Again, just a different way of taking the choice away from Kyoko.
** END OF SPOILERS **

Watch this if you have nothing else to watch, otherwise you're probably better off putting it at the end of your queue.