Whenever someone asks me if I have watched Toradora! That is the first thing I will say to that person. The story is overrated, the characters are dull and the ending is ridiculous.
Now I have your attention, the plot. The plot is a pretty average boy likes girl, girl like other boy, ends happy but not really type of boring story you will see in American rom-com movies that is so predictable you can see in coming 2 episodes in. The story is set around a male protagonist called Ryuji Takasu who is apparently considered a delinquent because of his eyes and because of this feels he will never get a girlfriend. We discover he has been put in the same class as his best friend Yusaku Kitamura and a girl he has a crush on, Minori Kushieda. When he is at school he happens to meet the Taiga-chan, a short girl with a short temper which is why she is likened to a tiger and the two create a dysfunctional 'friendship' relationship based around on their crushes.
My friend and I reminisce about this anime from time to time and the initial reaction is how did we watch 25 episodes of this? It was terribly boring with a cast of people who were pretty uninteresting too and a lot of pointless episodes that just seemed like the studio had some left over money so put in a lot of filler.
The characters, I think, are the main thing wrong with this anime. We have Taiga, a short girl who seems to be ostracised for being short and quick to get angry which I have never seen in anime before ever. We also have Ryuji, a lead male character who is also ostracised for because people think he is a ‘delinquent’ because he has ‘delinquent eyes’ which seems like a really superficial thing for someone to base opinions of him to me but it is what it is. Then the other two, Minori and Kitamura, who seem to change their minds, attitudes and actions every ten minutes to benefit the main storyline. The interaction between the main characters seems really forced, with Ryuji taking a lot of grief from Taiga and has to cook and clean for her because she knows he has a crush on a girl. I don’t know why he takes it for something that seems pretty trivial from where I am looking but there we go.
The ending to this anime is just ridiculous. I vowed to have no spoilers in my reviews so I can’t say what the ending is but take my word for it, ridiculous.
I must say the start of this anime for me did offer some hope that I found something that would be good to watch but this hope was quickly taken away by the poor story I was being sucked in to. I also must say the dub and sub work on this anime was a good quality as was the art but it was quite easy to overlook these points with Toradora!
In conclusion, if you are looking for a first-class romance/comedy anime, run very far away from Toradora!
