Zutto Mae kara Suki deshita. Kokuhaku Jikkou Iinkai

Love is blooming at Sakuragaoka High School. Natsuki Enomoto has finally mustered the courage to confess to her childhood friend, Yuu Setoguchi. However, in the final moments of her confession, an embarrassed Natsuki passes it off as a "practice confession." Oblivious to her true feelings and struggling with his own, Yuu promises to support Natsuki in her quest for love. While Natsuki deals with her failed confession, fellow classmate Koyuki Ayase struggles with his own feelings for Natsuki. Despite his timidness, he is determined to win over her heart.

Zutto Mae Kara Suki deshita.: Kokuhaku Jikkou Iinkai follows Natsuki as she dreams of one day ending her practices and genuinely confessing to Yuu. Meanwhile, close friends also find themselves entangled in their own webs of unrequited love and unspoken affections.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Hayasaka, Akari Main

Asumi, Kana Japanese

Aida, Miou Main

Toyosaki, Aki Japanese

Setoguchi, Yuu Main

Kamiya, Hiroshi Japanese

Serizawa, Haruki Main

Suzumura, Kenichi Japanese

Mochizuki, Souta Main

Kaji, Yuuki Japanese

Enomoto, Natsuki Main

Tomatsu, Haruka Japanese

Ayase, Koyuki Supporting

Yonaga, Tsubasa Japanese

Setoguchi, Hina Supporting

Asakura, Momo Japanese

Narumi, Sena Supporting

Amamiya, Sora Japanese

Akechi, Saku Supporting

Midorikawa, Hikaru Japanese

Saitou, Shunsuke Producer

Yanagisawa, Tetsuya Director

Nagasaki, Yukio Sound Director

Kuramoto, Hotaka Episode Director

Reviews

Oct 4, 2016

MrBouBou

Recommended

"who is she going to confess her love to?", "who is she in love with?" ,"everyone in love", "I know she is in love with someone".....as they keep thinking like that they start hurting each other with words they don't mean it.

The movie is your typical sweet RomCom, which talks about a group of friends being secretly in love with each other and we can't forget the love triangle. The story wasn't any new but to me, every single one has its own charm just like this movie which has its unique way of getting them to struggle until they find their way to master ... their courage to confess!!

The art was pretty nice as they show us cute smiles, sad expressions, and tears of joy, jealousy, and happiness!!.As for the sound, it was good!!!


To summarize:
-Story: 8/10
-Art: 9/10 (a wonderful animation)
-Sound: 10/10 ( The sound was a great impact to the story)
-Character: 8/10 ( every character has her own charm)
-Enjoyment: 10/10
-Overall: 9/10 (it was a great movie!! I really enjoyed it!)

Reviewer’s Rating: 9

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Oct 9, 2016

crispyn64

Mixed Feelings

Why Is Love So Hard? - An "I've Always Liked You" Review

I did not like I’ve Always Liked You. To put it bluntly, this 1-hour and 3-minute long movie is shallow, generic, and all-around meaningless. Its sole purpose is to showcase the moments of high love confessions, in ways that are neither clever nor original. Just like many other stories in the genre of romance, I’ve Always Liked You uses these confession as a sort of “payoff”, yet it doesn’t offer up any kind of worthwhile setup for them. The characters are also unmemorable and lack any compelling motivations or adversities. While the animation and ... music are of an acceptable quality, from a narrative standpoint this film is plain mediocre. But let’s dig a little deeper than that, shall we?

First let’s take a look at the characters and the respective narratives they fit into. The main plot centers around Natsuki and Yu, the token childhood friends that actually DO end up together. Yu is the nice guy that’s always been there for Natsuki, he’s kinda cute and that’s about all there is to his character (all the characters are about this shallow by the way). Natsuki is just a loveable tomboy who’s shy about her feelings like everyone else in this movie, and for some reason wears sweatpants under her school uniform. At the beginning of the film, she confesses to Yu and then quickly retracts that confession, playing it off as “just practice” for the person she’s really in love with. Then the entire movie passes before she comes back to him and confesses for real. Leading right up to that moment was a bunch of still-frame flashbacks to their childhood, showing all the times that Yu had been considerate to Natsuki, serving as evidence to why Natsuki likes him in the first place. It’s pretty shallow because they never actually show a genuine, written out moment between the two for portraying how and why they feel the way that they do. I’d liken it to watching a slideshow at a wedding for people you barely know. Oh boy, it’s the bride and groom as children moving up to the point that they’re at now, except I don’t really know who they are and wasn’t there personally for these moments so this doesn’t really affect me at all. *makes fart noise with tongue*

Next there’s Akari and Souta, the cute purple haired girl and the guy who falls in love with her for solely superficial reasons. It’s that sort of “love at first sight” catch-22, where it’s really not meaningful at all if they actually fell love at the sight of each other, because that makes their relationship based off looks and not personality. There is a bit of reason beyond that very base level of affection, as Akari does have a moment of appreciation for the act of kindness she witnessed Souta perform slyly on a train. In Souta’s mind however, it’s basically a matter of “I like her, how can I make her mine?”. Of course, it sounds a lot more innocent coming from him, but by the time he finally works up the courage to ask her out he comes off as borderline misogynistic. The nicest way to put it would be that he has a very “traditional” mindset, and he basically demands her to make lunches for him every day because that’s what good girlfriends do…ugghh.

As for Miou and Haruki, they secretly like each other and nothing happens.

Finally, there’s Koyuki, and he’s in love with Natsuki as well. This white-haired shy-boy asks her out to a HoneyWorks concert and then needlessly walks her home after it’s over. He ends up not being able to control himself and hugs her under the soft glow of a street lamp, illuminating them in the night for all the neighbors to see. They didn’t really do anything inappropriate, but Yu comes barging out anyway and takes Natsuki away from Koyuki. Natsuki cries but quickly gets over it by the next morning and that’s about it.

Overall, this film is wholeheartedly hollow and unoriginal in terms of both plot and characters. There’s virtually no conflict, and these downright privileged students have nothing to overcome but a very basic sense of nervousness. There is not one single hurdle put in front of these characters that prove to be even the tiniest bit difficult, and they lack any significant flaws that could hinder them. Without having to go through any remotely serious strife, what makes their achievements important, or anything they do in life compelling? And the only answer I can come up with is: nothing. This story is a very simple answer to a very simple question: If you like someone, summon the courage to tell them your feelings. And then everything will be fine because it turns out they like you too. While it might be entertaining to watch cute high school students to go through the motions of romance, there is absolutely nothing consequential to learn from this particular experience. And that’s a shame because it actually looks quite pretty.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Nov 11, 2019

AiwiloNik

Not Recommended

I gotta admit, I'm a sucker for a good romance. I like it in basically every shape or form: I like it with a sad ending, a happy ending, with comedic ambiance, with serious atmosphere and one of my favourite types is the cute, heart-warming one.

But this one?

This one I hated.

I can't even describe how excruciating it was to watch. The plot was completely decentralized, unnecerarily jumping from one character to another. I guess the writers wanted to include as many stories from the music videos as possible but because of the limited time they had for this movie, it ended up being about ... everything and nothing at the same time.

The formula that worked in case of the music videos, where we knew close to nothing about characters but still rooted for them, certainly shouldn't have been applied here.
The personalities of the characters are just your cookie-cutter shoujo archetypes or at least they seem so because, as I mentioned before, we know close to NOTHING about the characters. We don't really know much about their relationships beside who-has-a-crush-on-whom, we never learn why these characters are in love with each other, we don't really know their history, we are just randomly presented with certain informations about them like "this girl likes this band", "this boy likes video games", "just person likes this person... just because".
This one hour is filled mostly with some mundane, irrelevant to the plot and random scenes that don't even add much to the characters, they just happen because "everyone eats food, people eat food and have a small talk, let's have a scene with 3 characters stuffing themeselves and talking about nothing!" or that scene that got me scratching my head the most with the question "why does it have to exist?" which is... a shot of each character sitting in their bathtubs at the same and just thinking about how much their suck when it comes to love.

Dear Lord, cease my suffering.

I wasn't expecting some kind of super deep-psychological character development or complicated plot or anything. I wanted to see a simple, cute high-school romance and let go of my worries for today. But this is so badly written storyboard-wise, and since I write stories myself, I just can't help but get irritated by how you can delete the majority of the movie and it would change almost nothing about the plot. The story is just a one big mess. Instead of introducing us to a close to 10 characters, the writers should've focused on the main 3 the movie is supposed be about: Natsuki, Ayase and Yuu and just go with their story.

This way there would be more time to invest in showing us the relationship between Natsuki and the boys and we would know why are we supposed to root for them. Because I don't root for them. I don't fricking care who she end up with at the end because I know close to nothing about this characters, their history and their personalities. Let us see why Natsuki and Yuu are such good friends, let us see how they interact with each other. Show us how Natsuki and Ayase met and why he fell in love with her. Fricking show us his make-over he supposedly did just for her! We are only presented with this fact in the fricking moment he shows up on the screen for the first time! Like "This is Ayase, btw he looked like this in the past but this was before the movie". This way we would have mor cohesive and engaging story.

There's this other movie about Yuu's little sis Hina, which btw I watched before this flick because I didn't know they were related. They did what I just said and it turned out sooooo much better. I mean, it wasn't great but I can at least say I kinda enjoyed it. We saw how Hina met the guy, how she started falling in love with him, why she fell in love with him, what she felt back then etc. etc. It revolved mostly about her story, hinting from time to time that there are other characters with their own crushes ("check our music videos for more, *win wink*") but it never to deviate from the main plotline which was good. Heck, I only know anything about Ayase thanks to that anime!

And that's why I think this story is terrible and you shouldn't waste your time on it, go watch the music videos, good night.

Reviewer’s Rating: 3

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The official website for Kokuhaku Jikkou Iinkai series has announced the details for the previously announced TV anime special. Titled Itsudatte Bokura no Koi wa 10 ...read more

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The official Twitter account of Gom of HoneyWorks has announced that the Kokuhaku Jikkou Iinkai project will get a TV anime special. The tweet does not explicitly st...read more

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	Poll: Zutto Mae kara Suki deshita.: Kokuhaku Jikkou Iinkai Episode 1 Discussion ( 1 2 3 ) Stark700 - Oct 4, 2016	112 replies	by Tsuyo_Mika »» Oct 17, 4:47 AM
	Does anyone know the right order of the songs series? Fureiya - Oct 8, 2016	14 replies	by Clarian »» Apr 21, 2023 7:49 AM
	Are the sequels good? AoiroBlueColor - May 15, 2021	6 replies	by hahailham1 »» Feb 13, 2022 8:42 AM
	Streaming on Crunchyroll on October 4 nehnehneji - Sep 18, 2016	6 replies	by SoulReaper6969 »» Oct 3, 2021 1:17 PM
	Key Visual Stark700 - Nov 12, 2015	18 replies	by Kenudz »» Sep 21, 2016 10:46 AM