Triangle Heart: Sweet Songs Forever

What originally attracted me to Triangle Heart was its relation to Magic Girl Nanoha. I was a big fan of Nanoha so I was looking forward to viewing this. I thought at first that this was just a spinoff staring the older brother and sister but I realized later that this series came first. Unfortunately it just didn’t live up to successor.

The main problem with Triangle Heart is that it is a series that doesn’t know what it wants to be. Is it a shounen style action series? Is it romance? A musical drama? Because it tries to ... be too many things it fails at everything. Besides sharing the same names and a few personality quirks it has almost nothing to do with Nanoha. Pretty much all of that series characters appear in some for albeit most extremely briefly. The series is just too short to do more than one thing. There are action scenes with sword battles and gun fights but there is nothing particularly inspired about them. There isn’t enough action to keep action fans interested. They try to bring in some romantic elements but those don’t work either because the series is to short and the characters too wooden and 2-dimensional to generate any interest in them.

The plot, to put it bluntly, is stupid. We start the show in England at a music academy. The new headmistress Fiasse, is a famous singer and is about to go on a world tour to raise money for a charity she is involved with and promote her school. She is being attacked by an unknown enemy and has to be protected by Ellis a highly skilled bodyguard and her team. I found it all pretty unbelievable and ridiculous. At this point Kyouya and Miyuki Takamachi appear, who are childhood friends and apparently ninjas. The major difference with them is that while in Nanoha series they are the older brother and sister of Nanoha, in this series they are cousins though raised as siblings. All four of the leads grew up together so they all have a shared history and a shared tragedy. Kyouya's father was killed protecting Fiasse's father years before from the same mysterious enemy. There is friction between Ellis and the two as she is resentful that they have been brought in and think that them using swords will be a liability and will only get them killed. (Can't say I wouldn’t agree with her there)

One thing that Triangle Heart shares with Nanoha is there are just too many characters. The plot (what little there is) is crushed under the weight of scores of meaningless supporting characters who bring nothing to the story. It tried to tell the story of four main characters but the series isn’t long enough to give any of them justice. Thus none of them are interesting nor do you care about what happens to them. I mentioned the cameos of many characters from Nanoha? Well the story would have been better off without them. The supreme example of this is the two girls from the cafe who are always fighting. Why? I couldn’t even tell you their names, just that one had green hair and the other blue. What exactly is your point?

The art and sound are very well done however. So from a visual standpoint there is a lot to like. Very adorable character designs and vibrant colors. The music is pretty good as well, the songs were performed by Kotoko, who is a favorite of mine. The voice acting is not as strong however.

I can’t recommend this series though. Even if you’re a big Nanoha fan this series is so different and pointless that you are just wasting your time with it. If you haven’t seen Nanoha go watch that instead, you can thank me later.

5 WORDS OR LESS REVIEW : Just watch the Nanoha series.

Triangle Heart is another one of those series that could have been better. It definitely had some potential, but it wasn’t executed well.

I gave it a chance – I really did, but for the first two episodes felt like a chore to me. The last two got a bit better, and I realized it got better because the plot was more defined by then. I guess that’s it – the plot development was really slow, and since it was a 4 episode OVA (with limited time) I thought they should have defined the plot sooner.

I ... really did like the last two episodes. It got more exciting, especially with the fight scenes. I also like the conflict between using guns and swords, and why the main characters chose their paths. It’s almost as if it’s an anime version of the Hollywood movie The Bodyguard.

Speaking of characters, I can’t say I liked them a lot. They all lacked charisma – none of them was appealing enough. Also, there was a lot of characters, specially the ones who work at Midoriya(?) café. Most of them were there for providing fan service. All I could remember was Nanoha – she had her own series after all.

I didn’t know most of the voice actors for this anime. Hikaru Midorikawa was a familiar name, he played Tamahome in Fushigi Yuugi, one of my favorite series. I guess he did a good job of portraying Kyoya. Tomokazu Seki is another familiar name – he is my favorite male voice actor after all, but I didn’t notice it was him right away. His role wasn’t a main character role.

Art style reminded me of the original Kanon series, because the characters looked somewhat stubby, and I thought they all looked dowdy. I did like the background design though – As stand-alones, the backgrounds would really make nice watercolor paintings. Color coordination needed some improvement.

Because it is a music-themed anime, it has to have good music – and it does. KOTOKO did a good job in singing the opening and ending songs. I also noticed that for a 4 episode OVA, it had a lot of insert songs which were all pop and cutesy.

To end my review, I have to say that the Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha series made a really good spin-off of this OVA. You don’t have to watch this to understand the Nanoha series, but it’s fun to recognize the characters from the OVA. Finally, it’s not bad, but it’s not good either.

Triangle Heart -Sweet Songs Forever, could have been made into a much longer series, but for the 4 episodes it was packed into, it was done very well.

-Story
The story, or plotline, was quite slow for such a short anime. But unlike other < 6 episode animes that I have seen, this one did not throw all of the plot into the last two Episodes. It slowly leaks out the plot. From the beginning to the end, you learn much more about the Characters. However, the story, being such slowly done in such short time, has a downfall; it was very simple. Good guy versus Bad ... Guy. Bad Guy is a Bad Guy. Good Guy is a Good Guy. Simple stuff like that.

-Art
I noticed something very noticible, it is very similar to Nanoha (Magical Girl Nanoha), since this was an offspin of it. Even so, the art wasn't completely horrible, nor was it amazingly great. But the slicing of people was drawn quite well. The main characters were drawn nicely, with the big affro-like hairstyle. There is a tint of randomness in the minor characters though. If this was meant to be, even the art conveyed dual messages.

-Sound
The music wasn't spectacular with drums and rock, but it was very nicely done. Also because that this anime is music based (note the title, Sweet Songs Forever) it would have to have at least half-way decent music, no? The music was horrible. The Background music where there was, blended in with the anime very well. Sometimes silence is also a great tool of sound.
Sound also includes the different dialects used in the anime. This anime used Chinese, more specifically both Cantonese and if I can hear correctly Mandarin. Although I might not be like superior in these languages, I know Cantonese when I hear it, and they've got pretty nice Cantonese. Also the English is quite correctly pronounced, although with a slight accent (more or less depending on who is speaking), it was bearable. It wasn't like you couldn't tell what they were saying.

-Characters
The characters like nearly all other good vs evil animes, good has the upper hand in skill, and evil has the upperhand in numbers or weoponry. Like the normal power ranger thing... However, this anime displayed that to its max. That wasn't too good. Even so, there was, even with minute numbers of episodes, character development. You understand the main characters' actions and their reason for doing so. The Characters are all very tangible and had great cohesion with the story, even if some of the characters seemed to have supernatural powers.

-Enjoyment
For some reason, it captivated my short attention, span of 3 ooohh shiny. I guess since I didn't read anything about it, I didn't know what it would be like, which might actually be much better than reading everything you can then watching it. So if you are going to watch it, might as well just stop reading this right?
The reason why it scored so highly was that it took choir, something that is not very unisex, and gave it introduction to everyone. Even so, as you understand every inference they make, you understand more and more of the characters, to the point where you can relate to their unnatural experience.

-Overall
Although this could have had an extended plot, like I said above, for its miniscule length, it was very well done.
It also like most of the stories of the olden days, had a moral, and a theme. It stuck with that theme throughout the 4 episodes. Also each tone that was given to the circumstances were all very distinct yet also very subtle.
All in all, it was a Great, if not excellent. I loved it, but that's might just be me.

-Casper