Yume Oukoku to Nemureru 100-nin no Oujisama

(I've never played the game, this review is in the eyes of someone who only watched the anime.)

*Warning: Spoilers*

Dreams are wonderful things. We can make anything fictional into reality in our dreams, we can go from here, to the ends of the universe in our dreams, even if we cannot remember them.

In Yume Oukoku to Nemureru 100-nin no Ouji-sama, they took the dreams-can-be-taken-away-concept and made it into an absolute mess.

This summer, my goal was to watch and rate every single otome game anime adaptation that's ever been made. I've cringed, I've cried, and I've wanted to die. But, no matter how bad any of those ... animes were, they weren't boring. They had a good concept, just portrayed terribly. But, Yume Oukoku isn't like that. Yume Oukoku is just, well. Boring. Very boring. Hell, they couldn't even stick with the story 50% of the time. (I'll go more into detail about that later.)

Now, let's begin my review on Yume Oukoku.


Story: 5/10
In Yume Oukoku, a young girl (whom we never learn the name of cause they literally just call her Princess.) has found herself transported to another world. She is apparently the "Princess" that's supposed to awaken every single one of the boys inside a Royal Ring. Except, they literally only do it once. "Why are they inside a Royal Ring?! @_@" You may ask. Around whatever years ago every single prince from every country teamed up to attack the dream-eaters, but they have been sealed away into their royal families ring. From that, it sounds interesting, right? A young girl traveling across the world to save all these princes?! Well. They only save 1 prince, and the rest of the entire show is them traveling across the world helping princes who are supposed to be sealed away. They don't keep up with the story at all, it's boring. Honestly, in my opinion, I'd prefer it for them to go to awaken princes.

Art: 4/10
Honestly, the art, in the beginning, was really okay, I feel like as the show went on, it got lazier, messier, and awkwarder (is that a word?). When the shots would be from far away, their eyes would be too big, when we were close up their mouths looked out of place, or too big.

Sound: 3/10
I don't know if the room they were in was echoey, but sometimes the characters sounded really far away from the microphone, even in normal scenes. It was really distracting.

Character: 3/10
So, we have the normal personality-less female lead, we have the bubbly male lead #1, and we have the edgy male lead #2. The female lead was really annoying. Both male leads were annoying. I only tolerated like a character in this and it was that mermaid dude, he had like 3 lines but still had more personality than the mcs.

Enjoyment: 4/10
At first, I thought this anime was gonna be cute n cool, oh boy was I wrong. I ended up skipping through 4 episodes cause nothing plot development worthy was happening. Rather than having fun, watching this felt like a chore like I HAD to watch it. I was very, very bored.

Overall: 5/10
I think this anime had a lot going for it in the beginning, I feel like the team working on this got lazier as each episode passed, like they didn't wanna keep working on it like they were working on it cause they had too. This anime is very uneventful, boring, and cliched. I'd recommend you watch Meiji Tokyo Renka instead of this.

Good OP.
What a song!

"Afureru Hikari" (Overflowing Light) by Moumoon goes straight to my Top-3 this season's OP (struggling at the podium with Tonegawa and Banana Fish ones).

They are a Pop duo (guitar player/other instruments man and vocalist/percussionist lady) highly influenced by international folk and Jazz with astonishing artistic skills (miss YUKA is a heck of a singer; powerful, elegant and with a lovely tesiture) and an undeniable good taste for composition.

The song sounds neat and polished, yet spontaneous... the word "delicious" is not too much to qualify this melody. Apparently fragile though solid in the inside.

If you are abled, try to listen the acoustic live ... version Moumoon displayed during an online show at their own SSMM (SELF-SPAM ALERT: I excerped a clip from it in my own accounts -I'm too polite to link them here-).
I wouldn't dare to say that version is better than the official OP song, with its arrangements and post-production and stuff.
But by no means it's worse.

If you dislike this song, we cannot be friends.




Addendo: Mmmh... I feel kinda I was forgetting somewhat...


Addendo2: Ah! I remember it now! The anime!
Well... it is based upon a phone video game with puzzles and cute chibi guys and sh*t...
I mean... What you reasonably could expect from that?

Too good they managed to generate a not-that-terrible Isekai world out of it, too good they're holding the inverted harem's ground against the obvious mc's urges to start fujoshing as if tomorrow never comes.
So far they are holding her, I mean (those Fujoshi gals... you kow, they are unbeatable).

They even had stomach to put some decent self-parody gags here and there and did a re-interpretation of Alice in Wonderland not worse that the Tim Burton's ones...
.. wich is not exactly talking big, I'm aware of.

All in all, I'd like to see some of the artists and technicians involved with a better primal source.
The original ONAs weren't that bad, as well.


Addendo3: But what an OP! What an astonishing and delicious and wonderful song!

We will never say this too many times.

TL;DR: Don't even bother.

L;DR:
On one fine morning, I crawled out of my dumpster and went to twitter for a morning's perusal of Kappei Yamaguchi's account. He'd retweeted something from an account called "yume 100," and being as nosy as I am, I realized he had voiced a super-minor character in this mobile otome game I'd never heard of. I love otome games, hitting the genre's peak demographic, and my curiosity dragged me to this MAL page. Well, Mr. Yamaguchi himself doesn't appear in this anime, but hey, I like ikemen, so I thought I'd give this show a shot.

Why am I telling you the story ... of how I wound up watching this anime? Probably because it's a more interesting plot than the one actually presented in Yume 100. Don't ask me to summarize the plot because I don't think I could tell you any of it, despite having finished this show literally minutes ago.

And characters? With a personality about as charming and and intriguing as a plastic water bottle, nameless-protagonist-heroine-princess provides little of substance to this anime. Luckily, her two male (princes, of course) companions are very good looking and also have something resembling a personality, and are probably the only things that kept me watching this thing till the end.

Do you want story?
Yume 100 doesn't have that.

Do you want romance?
Somehow, Avi and Kihel have more tension than Princess-heroine and... anyone. So this is the wrong place to look.

Do you want worldbuilding?
Hey, nothing here makes sense. What is Traumere? Eh. What kind of world is this? Who cares. How does this "dream" thing work, that big plot point about dream-power? Beats me. It's like if someone played a game of telephone and told Yume 100 "hey, remember, when world building, show, don't tell, okay?" and then Yume 100 went, "Okay, don't show, don't tell!"

Do you want animation?
I think if I misclicked my tabs and ended up watching one of my fourth-grade power point presentations with all of the crappy transitions included, I would still be witnessing better animation than Yume 100. It's not terrible(?), but I really could not believe this show came out in the last couple of years, since the quality makes me think of the 2000s. The character designs could be horribly off model at times, and the "fight" scenes reminded me of stickman flipbooks I used to draw in the corner of my math textbook. It's not good, folks.

Do you want... like, anything?
Let me give you a MAL tutorial real quick. You press the "anime" button at the top, then you press "top anime," and there you go--anything from 1 to 4,000 is more worth watching than this white bread of a show.

But, to be fair, my otome-game-loving heart still kind of enjoyed Yume 100. Yeah, it's mindless, trashy, and terrible in every sort of way, but then again, so am I.