Aside from winning the award for the laziest title name ever, Green Green is a show from the early 2000s and it hasn't aged well in the slightest! Like many other shows of that time, the harem genre was taking effect and it seemed that everyone began to jump on the gravy-filled bandwagon and the result, is something truly horrifying. While this show, just from the pictures present here on MAL, may seem like your typical harem with the main aim being fan service, I assure you, what lurks underneath is an unspeakable piece of garbage that has transcended the very realms of humanity itself! Okay, I may be relying a little too much on hyperbolic language here, but one of the reasons why I hate this show, despite the numerous other reasons to hate it that I'll get into in a moment, is that Green Green was amongst my first few anime that I ever watched at the beginning of my anime watching career at the end of 2011. Here I am, optimistic and ignorant to the idea of a terrible anime, when BOOM!, like a hit to the nuts, here comes this vile piece of faeces to completely mentally scare me. But, I've stalled for too long. Unfortunately, I must dive into why this anime is so horrible!
The original product of Green Green was, in fact, an eroge, but the show completely omits all of the sex scenes and leaves us with nothing. Why did they think this was a good idea? Eroge are not exactly known for having great narratives or anything, aside from a few series I can think of from the top of my head, and God, do the barebones story ever show when you remove the only thing that would keep people interested in the first place. Essentially, some random all-boys school in the middle of nowhere is greeted by a bunch of girls from an all-girl school, as they both live with each other for a month as a social experiment of some kind set up by both respective schools, while the boys try and get into the girl's underwear. That's it! The rest of the show is essentially just a bunch of painfully unfunny and awkward jokes while the female characters are forced to remove as much clothing as possible in the most insulting of ways while the writers attempt, ATTEMPT to build up relationships between these characters but it just falls flat on its face.
Aside from the lack of any plot, the characters are just as bad, if not, worse in many regards and aspects. The main character, Yuuskue, is about as entertaining as watching paint dry, actually, no, scrap that. That's an insult to paint drying on a wall! Not only is he given the most bland, cookie-cutter design, but his involvement in the story is as strong as Steven Hawkins in a boxing match. For a character the show seems to be trying to push as someone we should feel empathy towards, it's kind of hard to do when he has nothing to care about. He has no charisma, no personality, and yet, all of the girls still harbour crushes for this damn guy! He clearly is nothing else but a bland self-insert for all of the filthy weebs to latch onto and thus, they made his personality as bare bones as possible in order to achieve this. Screwit. Even though this anime is not adapted from a light novel, I am dubbing this guy "Light Novel Empowerment Guy" for the remainder of this review since his character reminds me so much of your typical light novel narrative. Anyway, Light Novel Empowerment Guy, somehow, manages to win the affection of every girl he encounters on his journey, through his amazing power of dullness, including the main love interest of the series, a girl named Chitose Midori. I bet the writer felt REAL smart using Chitose's last name, which means Green. Round of applause; originality is dead with this show!
Anyway, Chitose is completely in love with him from the offset, and we actually learn, and I can't believe I'm about to say this, that both Light Novel Empowerment Guy and Chitose were both lovers in a previous life and are reincarnations of those very same people! When I first watched this, I slammed my head on the desk from such a stupid plot twist. Not only was there no mention of the supernatural at all up to this point, aside from REALLY vague pieces of dialogue, but it comes across as so stupid and badly written. And guess what! Light Novel Empowerment Guy is still JUST as boring as was before! I don't care if he a reincarnation or whatever! In fact, now he is even duller since he behaved exactly like this, but in a previous life! Double the dullness for you! Anyway, Light Novel Empowerment Guy's and Chisote's relationship feels completely tacked-on and lifeless, not to mention superficial. It doesn't grow during the course of the series, we don't really understand why these two love each other aside from the fact that the script tells them to do so, and after Light Novel Empowerment Guy remembers his past, he falls in love with her straight away, erasing any development the characters may of had.
The show tries to develop Light Novel Empowerment Guy's relationships with the other girls, and while there is a little development between him and a girl called Futaba, nothing, in the end, feels satisfying or plays off in an interesting way. Each girl is clearly there to full-fill a certain archetype. We have the one with the big boobs, the loli character, the eccentric character and the Tsundere. They attempt to mask this by giving each girl some oddly specific personality trait, but just like Hand Shakers, this doesn't make a character interesting, in fact, it only further highlights how terrible the writing is. One girl has a strange obsession with a cactus; another likes horror stuff. That's it. Give every award to Green Green because CLEARLY nothing else will ever compete with this level of writing.
Now, at this point, the show doesn't sound as bad as I had described it to be in the opening paragraphs, but I haven't gotten to the parts I hate yet. That honour goes to the TERRIBLE comedy and the worst trio I have ever seen! Each joke is centred around three complete idiots and I HATED these characters. Never before have I been so repulsed and annoyed at three fictional characters before, but these guys, aside from being completely obnoxious, are also complete damn creeps who attempt to sexually harass the girls in an attempt to have their way with them. They're essentially three pervert male characters, all of which consistently break the law and do just some plain creepy stuff! One of these three has a complete obsession with little sisters and attempts to have his way with a girl who looks no older than ten-years-old. Not only does he sneak into her room at night and sleep next to her, but, for some reason, also brings a bowl and some rice and, well...decides to eat rice next to her sleeping body while crying to himself in regards to how cute she is. If this sounded insane, that's because it is, and the anime expects us to laugh at this crap! I spent more time being freaked out if anything else! And this scenario I just explained to you is one of the more tamer ones! They get much worse! One scene, for instance, features the trio stuck inside a sauna of some sorts, as they become hotter and hotter and, because of the lack of water, become more disillusioned. They imagine that each one the guys is a girl they like and begin to touch each other sexually! When I first watched this scene I turned it off straight away and had a long, cold shower to reevaluate all of my life up to that point.
At one point, they decide to use a fishing rod to forcibly remove a girl's top, revealing her bare breasts; another time they are, no joke, raped by a bear while out in the woods, and they're constantly tearing off their clothes in the presence of women. I mean, I know that puberty makes everyone become a bit more, "excited", let's put it, but these guys are pretty much all sex offenders, and it's just the fact that the show thinks this is comedic is what makes me hate this show as much as I do. It's disgusting, as low brow as you could possibly go and is wrong on so many levels that I can't even explain all of the events. I would tell you to check it out for yourselves since the only way to know of the horrors this show entails is to see it yourself but I would never wish this upon another human being. The show is clearly aiming at being an ecchi, but, even then, it fails in that regard. The girls themselves aren't all that appealing in character designs and looks and, if you're watching an anime for such a reason, there are so many better alternatives, even other shows that aired in the same season such as Ikkitousen. Sure, Ikkitousen is also trash, but, at the very least, works as an eechi anime and doesn't take itself seriously.
The animation and art design is AWFUL; everything looks so bland and washed out. As the title suggests, there sure is a lot of Green, so much so, that the shots of the hills and grass have burnt a permanent image into my retinas forever. The character designs are dull and lack any originality and the animation is the most bare-bones and cheap you could imagine. Characters barely move, and when they do, the movement feels clunky. They did manage to get the boob jiggles right, because, clearly, that is the most important aspect of this show. The music is also terrible. The opening is a super obnoxious J-Pop song that doesn't have any right to be so upbeat for such a boring show, and you can gauge the quality of this trash just from the opening alone. It's essentially just a mouse cursor that hovers over the girl's naked bodies and clothes materialize out of thin air. I have to wonder, however. For some reason, when the girls are equipped with a bra, their breasts bounce even more than before, even though a bras main function, at least to my knowledge, is to keep the goods in place. I know I'm looking into this way too deep but when a show offers you this little intellectual stimulation, your mind wanders over to such things.
FUN FACT! This show actually did get a hentai OVA release, and just like the show, it is one of the worst hentai ever made. It's pretty bare bones in terms of the sex scenes and there is even a lesbian scene, but all of this is ruined by the fact that we have the trio, now personified as monkeys, jerking off whilst watching Light Novel Empowerment Guy and Chitose having sex. It's creepy and this OVA adds nothing more to the characters or story, in fact, it regresses everything.
In conclusion, this anime is awful in every sense of the word. While not as technically broken as something like Hand Shakers, the sheer amount of strange, gross and uncomfortable scenes made me feel sick and combine that with a completely boring and linear narrative with some terrible excuse of reincarnation makes for a terrible ride. Avoid this garbage like the plague.
