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I was craving a good romance story after a long time without them, and seeing how many people praised Ao Haru Ride, I decided to give it a go. I liked the premise and the characters seemed like they were going to be great people for whom I could feel for. Sadly, I got absolutely nothing.

Story:
The story of Ao Haru Ride is pretty simple and straightforward. Two people, Futaba Yoshioka and Kou Mabuchi, who used to be in love with each other meet up again after three years. The girl notices the boy has changed and tries to conclude whether or not she still has ... feelings for him.
There is nothing about this premise that makes me roll my eyes as long as it is done correctly, but this was not the case here. I wasn't expecting a masterpiece when I started this, I wasn't expecting an anime that will stick with me for days. I was simply expecting a sweet story about a boy and a girl finding their way back to each other.
I did not get that. In fact, I didn't really get anything. They are not finding their way back to each other, they are not even trying. It has mostly been a story about the Futaba crying how Kou has changed, and Kou telling Futaba how much she has changed. It was fine the first two times they mentioned it, but it was severely overused.
I guess someone must have realized this alone will not make for a good story, so they decided to push a friendship group subplot. Again, it's something I have no problems with, but I have a lot of problems with this specific friendship group. I don't understand why they are friends other than for the simple reason to have friends. They don't seem to have any shared interests, they don't seem to enjoy each other's company that much. They simply exist in the same place and time.
This anime is, however, supposed to be character driven, so I didn't let the story alone determine my score, even though the story was almost non existent, but I still gave it a 6/10.

Art:
Production I.G. has once again done a really good job with animation. The style is sweet, enhanced with a color palette that matches a slice of life anime. The pastel-like colors while showing flashbacks were a nice touch as well. I did feel like the chibi style was a bit overused, but it didn't bother me too much. I haven't noticed any drops in quality over the course of the show, which is why I gave the art an 8/10.

Sound:
Opening and Ending songs were fine. Nothing special, nothing that will stick with me, but they were good songs for this particular anime. As for the rest of the soundtrack throughout the show, I am very conflicted as to what exactly to say.
Some songs were such a good hit in a specific moment, enhancing the emotion trying to be shown. If it weren't for them, there would be absolutely no moment of this show that made me feel, but like I said, they really did a great job at choosing at which point to start playing which song. Of course, this is a double-edged sword, as some songs seemed were put in moments that were already overly dramatic, and the songs just enhanced all of that and it felt like I was left with so much melodrama that was completely unnecessary.
When it comes to voice acting, I had no problems with it. It wasn't remarkable, but it was done well, which is why my final grade for the sound is 5/10.

Character:
When you go into a character driven story, you expect the characters to be intriguing and entertaining. It makes me sad to say that this was definitely not the case here.
Let's start with Futaba, our female lead. Futaba is first shown as this cute, little girl whose problem is the fact that she is too cute. She is so cute, that every girl in her middle school got angry at her and stopped talking to her. She decided she wanted to make friends in high school, so she changed into a girl who doesn't comb her hair and eats a lot. A really huge change, I know.
Seeing how she is the main character of this show, you'd expect her to have a big role, but I just didn't get that impression. She was bland and went through minimal development. From time to time, it seemed as if the only point of having her in the show was to develop Kou, which isn't a bad thing in itself, but it becomes really bad since she is supposed to be a main character.

Moving on to Kou, who also managed to make me so mad. I liked him at the beginning. I knew from the get-go that his cold demeanor was just a mask and I was really looking forward to finding out why exactly that was the case. But sadly, I barely got anything. Turns out, he really is just a moody, cold, quiet, 'caring only brings suffering' type of a person. That is, he is that way right until the end, when he suddenly changes because Futaba made him see how much good there is in the world.

And that brings me to another part of the anime which I just don't understand. I picked this up because it says romance and because I liked the premise, but I got nothing when it comes to the relationship. It had no development, it wasn't believable, there simply wasn't anything there. If this anime didn't have a romance tag, I would have no problems with this, but I was expecting a lot more in regards to this.

I'll just briefly mention the 4 other characters who were kind of relevant to the story, but also not really.
We have Yuuri who is a cute girl who every other girls hates because of it. Sounds familiar? Yes, I know.
Murao is a cold girl who has a crush on a teacher and doesn't like hanging out with people from her class. Until she becomes a part of the group we follow and then suddenly starts to like hanging out just like that, completely out of the blue and incredibly out of character.
I don't even know what the point of Kominato is. He is a part of the friend group, but it seemed like he was there simply so they could have another boy in there.
And finally, we have Tanaka, Kou's older brother and the only character from this anime which I actually liked. There wasn't even anything that special about him, but compared to everyone else, he seemed like a person who had a reason to be in this story.

Enjoyment:
I enjoyed the first two or three episodes. I really did, and I was looking forward to watching everything and finding out more about the characters and seeing how their story will end. But with time, my enjoyment just completely went away. There was nothing going on that made me interested and I got so bored, which is saying a lot considering how short this anime is.

Overall:
Even though I came into this with very little expectations despite so many good reviews, I still got nothing. I got no romance, I went into a character driven story and was given completely bland characters and a bunch of unnecessary characters. The sound and animation were ultimately the only thing that saved this anime, so it gets a 4/10 from me.