"Roses are red,
Minori is a g,
Don't watch Toradora,
It sucks pp."
What can I say, I had unbelievably high hopes for Toradora. I just looked at this show and I immediately wanted to watch this because it looked and seemed like a fresh and fun romance, that has its needed drama elements to keep it entertaining; yet it ended up being one of the biggest chores that I had ever had to watch. This ain't just gonna be a review my guy, this is gonna be a whole ass rant, so clench your butt-cheeks and prepare for this crappy lesson about how to mess up a great show.
PLOT (simplified as hell):
Toradora bout Taiga and Ryuuji. They have crushes on the others best friend, so they try to set the other up wit they best friend and you can prob predict what happens next yadda, yadda, yadda-- sounds cool right? Next.
EPISODES 1-10 (estimate):
Toradora was everything I thought it was gonna be and more during the first 10 or so episodes. It was funny, entertaining, had intriguing and enjoyable characters (Taiga being my favorite, Ryuuji close 2nd).
Yeah, my complaint is not about Taiga as a character and how I think she's "annoying and basic", I throughly enjoyed her character and she was legitimately fun to watch. Adding on top of that, Ryuuji was also a character I throughly enjoyed, and Minori was a fun character with some of the best writing in the show.
I thoroughly enjoyed the hell out of all of this. I was telling my friends, family, and probably your uncle bout this show. My only wish was that Taiga and Ryuuji would have at least more than just like one good moment wit each other and thas it. How could you mess this up?
(8.5/10)
EPISODES 11-25 (also an estimate):
They messed it up.
(2/10)
PROBLEM #1: PLOTHOLES
No one really seems to point this out, but WHAT THE HELL IS THIS WRITING? There is just too much stuff in the 2nd half of the show that just flat out make zero sense. Stuff like introducing characters and placing them into an important role in the story, then the next second forgetting them completely, to randomly saying Taiga is moving, and then it doesn't happen, but then PLOT TWIST, she moves at that worse, most inconvenient, confusing part of the show called the ending. And people are praising this show for it's excellent writing? Either I'm braindead or there is some extra explaining that needs to be done.
PROBLEM #2: PACING
Arguably the most important thing to keeping a show entertaining is good pacing. When do we learn? When do we learn to not mess this shit up? Like man, how do you even compare the pacing to something? Hmmmm... lemme try putting it this way:
The pacing is slower than Shaq running (and not Lakers Shaq, I'm talkin present Shaq after a couple of donuts). Yeah, I said it. If you don't know how slow that is, let's say a turtle with a brick taped to its back is about as fast as Shaq running.
When the show goes from a great comedy with a excellent premise to a absolute disaster of a melodrama, the pacing takes a swan dive off Mt. Everest into the Earth's core. Just thinking about the pacing buts a bad taste in my mouth. I should say that yes, I am quite an impatient person, but this is just ridiculous. In a anime that focuses on the romance aspect, why the hell would you not focus on giving the characters more moments to let the watcher know: "Hey, things are actually progressing!". Of course, too much of this just makes the show annoying as well, but all they needed to do was put something on the table to keep the shitty melodrama watchable, and they just couldn't for some reason.
PROBLEM #3 (and the biggest): SUDDEN TONE SHIFT
Remember like 10 seconds ago when I was talking about the sudden switch to comedy to melodrama? Yeah, it's a pretty big problem.
It's not easy to describe the tone shift other than just saying it's sudden and makes the show just feel like filler in the 2nd half. And what does filler do? Make great shows less great It's just bad. I thought everyone knew that sudden changes are quite often one of the worst things you can do to a series. Getting an audience familiar to one thing and then just saying "Scratch that, let's just start a whole new show with the same title" (talkin to you SAO). It's not as bad as Sword Art Online's abysmal sudden tone/storyline shifts, but it's undoubtedly bad.
PROBLEM #4: THE ENDING
The ending is one of the worst and most confusing I've ever seen, without a doubt.
You know that feeling of working on something with a passion for a long period of time, just to lose all your progress and have to start it all over? That's how the ending to Toraboring is. Yep, you just watched 20+ episodes just to have it utterly ruined (for me even further ruined) in the last two episodes.
Wait, you're telling me there's people that actually like the ending to this show? I get it, like we all have our opinions, and that's fine, but for this? Man, I just don't know. It has been a minute since I've watched this show, but I still to this day have never understood why the hell the ending is the way it is.
CONCLUSION:
I don't like this show if you couldn't tell. My personal rating for it is a 2.5/10, but for the review, my rating is a bit higher, but I can't go much further than that. I really liked the characters, I thought the art was good, the soundtrack was aight, but the show? No. I can't say I liked it much at all.
I would reccomend this show to some people I guess? It might be for some people but I just can't see why people like the 2nd half and the ending of this show, and if anyone wants to point anything out to me that I may have missed, go right ahead.
