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I never thought I’d see a Shaft adaptation of a romantic comedy, but they have gone and done one. If you’re not familiar with Shaft and their trademark style, found in shows like Madoka Magica, Hidamari Sketch, and the Monogatari series, I’d call Nisekoi a relatively gentle introduction to their absurdist, post-modern style. However, as for the story itself, which originated in the manga by Komi Naoshi (which for the record, I am not familiar with), I’d say Nisekoi is an occasionally entertaining harem-y romcom, but about average at best. Let’s break it down.

The Good

The first thing that jumps out at me in most Shaft-produced ... animation is the visuals, and Nisekoi doesn’t fail to deliver. Shaft’s trademark exaggerated camera angles, surreal background art, higher-than-average detail and frame-change rate, and of course, head tilt are all present and as fun to watch as ever. The visual style is more realistic than the ultra-sparse and very surreal Monogatari series, or the artsy mixed-media presentation of Madoka, but contains elements of both the realism and the absurdism.

I also really liked the voice acting in this show. Chitoge and Onodera (above, left to right) were both excellent. Chitoge’s VA, Touyama Nao, has a couple of starring roles in romcom type shows (Oregairu and Hataraku Maou-sama, for instance), and I appreciated how she well she handled Chitoge’s wide-ranging emotional registers in this show. Onodera’s VA, Hanazawa Kana, is practically ubiquitous but is perfect as usual in the role of the more easily-embarrassed shy girl. I also liked Raku’s VA, Uchiyama Kouki. He did a fine job with the very hammy role, playing very nicely off Chitoge’s temper and Onodera’s palpable kawaii-ness.

The Bad

If you’ve been anywhere around my blog before, you’ll know I don’t like harem-y shows very much. The whole point of harem is stagnation of the romantic status quo, or possibly just exploitation of an increasingly complicated love polygon, but regardless, the point stands. Harems don’t end up anywhere, and Nisekoi, similarly, ends up going nowhere. The final episode is about as frustratingly awkward as the first one, with the main exception of Chitoge having admitted her feelings for Raku to herself. (She’s literally the only one left at that point so…yay, progress?)

This isn’t even to mention the other two (frankly extremely annoying) girls who show up and end up with crushes on Raku. I guess they’re pretty inconsequential, since Raku dates Chitoge for the whole show and harbors a crush on Onodera from the first scene to the last, and mostly just brushes the other two off. The fact that the finale of the show has two otherwise very “romantic” scenes between each of the two female leads and Raku just cements the fact that this is really a romantic comedy with a love triangle at its center…and a harem ending as its finale.

The Ugly

The characters really pissed me off a lot of the time. Especially the supporting cast and that obnoxious Tachibana girl, who basically latches onto Raku midway through the show like a crusty barnacle. It doesn’t help that she has the most obnoxious speech patterns in the show (a self-styled ojou-sama register full of “watakushi”s and “desu wa no”s) and, well, she hits on Raku harder than a jackhammer. And that servant girl and Raku’s guy friend at school were pretty annoying, too. Onodera’s friend Ruri was okay because she was quiet and rather hilarious, but otherwise inoffensive.

At least the main characters were mostly bearable. Raku and Onodera’s mutually unadmitted (to each other, I mean) crush is the heart of the show, and Chitoge’s “fake” relationship with Raku provides the slapstick and the laughs (and the ship fuel). In short, if they hadn’t added the needless supporting “harem” characters, and if the show had provided some kind of closure to Raku’s struggles in romance, this could have been a much stronger show. Oh, and maybe if the last episode hadn’t been such a disaster.

The Verdict

A mixed bag for a cast with fun leads and some really obnoxious side characters. A silly love story that goes nowhere, and a terrible final episode that just brought the whole story (and the school, from the looks of it) down in shambles with its harem-ish and completely unresolved ending. Brilliant and hilarious Shaft animation, quality voice acting and fun theme music, and some touching romantic moments for the main triangle. All in all, I kind of enjoyed Nisekoi, but I wish it had been a lot better.

For this, my first ever written review for MAL, I decided to pick a series for which I had zero expectations going into watching the show. That is, no familiarity whatsoever with the source material (this is a TV original, so no issues there), or with the production staff or writers or any other personnel. This was a series I picked up "blind" at the start of the season and finished when it finished.

So just how did Galilei Donna end up being? If you want the short answer, it would be to both anime enthusiasts and casual watchers alike, “don’t bother.”

But I wouldn’t be doing ... this right if I didn’t go into further detail. Let us go through the various aspects in order and then summarize at the end.

The Story

Three sisters who are alternate-history Galileo's descendants, Hozuki, Kazuki, Hazuki learn of some kind of long-lost treasure of Galileo's and realize some evil energy corporation is also after it. After a rather violent disruption to their daily lives, they are forced to go on a journey to try to search for clues as to its identity and location before the evil company and some sky-faring pirates get their hands on it. So far, so good. It's a rather generic-sounding fetch quest or mystery/adventure story, but it has some potential in the right hands.

Unfortunately, the execution of the story is absolutely abysmal. It's like the writers thought the series needed a "treasure" mystery for the adventure to even occur in the first place, but all they were looking for was some kind of somewhat urgent situation with which to burden the delicate character of Hozuki such that she could look sort of moe while working her child-prodigy engineering magic (more on that later).

Whereas a classic mystery/adventure formula features (reluctantly or not) daring protagonists (again, more on that later) on a journey to solve some kind of puzzle by finding clues, and struggling against being set back by misdirection or other various conflicts, in Galilei Donna the pervading sense is that the story merely was an excuse to get the girls from one perilous action sequence to another with the "sketches" of Galileo as some kind of checkpoint.

Not once did I ever sense any kind of concern as to where the location of the next checkpoint would be, or what kind of puzzle they would have to solve to get their hands on it once the location was identified. In fact, in one particular instance, they randomly and inexplicably land in some far-off location I have since forgotten for reasons I didn't pick up on, and a strange hobo hands them a clue because he happened to have it.

And then it all concludes in the most inane, drama-less courtroom drama that I have ever seen onscreen. After giving us an entire show featuring about three girls on the run from an evil corporation and sky-pirates that clearly have very few scruples about killing or destroying to get what they want, the writers have the evil corporation arrest the girls and put them on trial...for stealing some of their precious energy source from them. Huh?

Note to writers: If your genre is mystery/adventure, put some mystery into your adventure, and have the climax of the show feature some kind of mystery-solving or at least a climactic battle for a long-lost treasure, please. It doesn't really count as a story if the protagonists accidentally stumble from clue to clue as though they were predefined checkpoints along a linear path, and then suddenly show up in a courtroom to defend themselves against a corporation that would probably just have killed them, anyway.

Throughout Galilei Donna, I am sorry to say, I was continuously baffled by the inexplicable sequence of events that followed one after another with barely any thread of plot stringing them together. Story: 2/10

The Art

To be honest, Galilei Donna was mostly a pleasure to look at. While a lot of the scenery was fairly generic, which made it seem like the writers did painfully little Google image searching for pictures of Italy, the action sequences were well-animated, and the character designs were unique and pleasant enough for this kind of show. In particular, Hozuki’s (Hocchi, Hocchibi) design was a high point.

In addition, the weapons, missile/rocket spam, the usual blingy computer displays, explosion effects, and other noticeably 3D-animated sequences were pretty well-done. This contributed to the general sense of fluidity and competence in the action sequences, of which there were plenty.

For the most part, the visuals delivered. However, there were a few very puzzling decisions that I could not shake off for the entire series, namely, why does alternate-future Italy look so Japanese, and more importantly, why was everything a fish?

These rather irksome questions were enough to cause me to actually laugh when I should have been riveted to the screen watching air-to-air missile combat during tense dogfights. Instead, what we got was...fish-fights? What?

In conclusion, this was a competently produced and animated show, with some odd design decisions that fell rather flat, and others that had some amount of charm to them. Art: 7/10

The Sound

The voice-acting in Galilei Donna was mediocre to decent. In particular, the three main girls had some decent amount of differentiation, though I wouldn’t go so far as to say they really had “personality,” but good enough. The minor characters were all reasonable well-acted as well, with relatively little “ham” or overly-dramatically delivered dialogue, except possibly for the sky pirate Cicinho, whose penchant for calling Hazuki “bambina” grew old very fast.

The opening and closing songs did their job and didn’t get too much in the way. Though I still remain puzzled as to their relation to the actual content of the series, they were competently sung and decently composed songs. I had no qualms about either, but they didn’t really stand out to me either. Sound effects in general were perfectly adequate, as were backing music tracks, but once again, neither particularly stood out to me.

A competent showing but not a particularly outstanding effort from the sound department. Sound: 6/10

The Characters

Unfortunately things get really bad when it comes to the characters. Though it is easy to nitpick over the incredibly lackluster cast of villains and side characters, in the interest of time and space, I will focus on the protagonists.

Hozuki, Kazuki, and Hazuki are, respectively, an unfailingly cute child prodigy engineer, a rather pessimistic and grouchy teenager who...complains a lot, and a college-age law student (which, as you know by now, really only matters a single time at the end of the show). The girls are part-Japanese, which seems be the case simply to give the writers a convenient excuse to have the main characters speak Japanese and visit Japan when they feel like it.

Supposedly, this show is about their adventure together and the relationship between these sisters who don’t seem to get along very well. So by the end, they should have grown both personally and interpersonally; that is, as individual people and in their relationships with each other. Well, it is certainly true that by the end of the show they got used to living together with each other and their companion Anna Hendrix in a cramped (but surprisingly stable and comfortable-looking) flying goldfish.

However, do not be fooled.Although we are treated to occasional squabbles over trivial matters in life aboard a flying goldfish, and then occasional moments where the evil corporation, pirates, or other struggles force them to work together, never do we really see their relationships advance. Instead it seems that, simply by virtue of having been through some troubling times together, the sisters now know each other somewhat better, and have decided that they really are a family. Aw...that’s so...touchingly obvious?

Well, whatever. I guess lack of relationship developments is all right so long each character has some kind of depth or personality or internal struggle she has to work out. Unfortunately, this is not the case either.

Hozuki doesn’t really have anything to her. Beyond being an adorable pre-teen with genius-level engineering skills, there is literally no depth to her character. She doesn’t even have an internal struggle to make up for it, unless you count “missing” her ancestor Galileo.

Kazuki, much in the same vein, is an angsty teenage girl, and that seems to be her entire character. I guess there is some unrequited crush or something but this is never really explored, just literally tossed aside at the end (symbolism!!). Her entire character seems to exist to complain about what the other two girls are doing.

Meanwhile, Hazuki seems to struggle with being hit on by a space pirate...oh, and I guess she’s the eldest and has some responsibility or something. Too bad doesn’t really have time to shoulder all that responsibility until the courtroom drama sequence and she...well, gets saved by her parents anyway. Sigh...so much for that.

Flat and uninteresting personalities, complete with generic and boring character concepts leads to a pretty dull cast. Characters: 2/10

Enjoyment

Well, you might have already sensed that I didn’t enjoy this show terribly much, and you’d be right. It was entertaining, mildly, to see this trainwreck of a show (shipwreck? fishwreck?) play out, all the while holding a glimmer of hope that something really astounding might occur to turn the show around. And, I guess it wasn’t an eyesore or too hard on the ears.

Still, though, “not annoying visually or audibly” is not enough to actually say I enjoyed something. If maybe I had cared for any of the content of the show, I would have enjoyed it more, but really, this was a vapid, forgettable piece of animation. Enjoyment: 3/10

Conclusion

In conclusion, some technically strong points lead to a watchable show that unfortunately has little to nothing in the way of content. This is a classic example of a show that tried too hard in all the wrong ways to be original or surprisingly, and ended up really just rehashing some clichéd story with some wooden characters, and then dressing it up in a different outfit or something.

Overall: 4/10