TLDR: Enjoyable anime with great art & animation, but if you're here for any character depth, plot depth, or relationship/romantic depth, this is not for you. Emphasis on depth.
We follow Yuki, a cute & adorable university student who is written with no personality. Just because she is sheltered, probably in part due to her hearing disability, does not mean she should be written with NO personality. Her whole story arc is meeting a hot guy on a train who is wildly different than her (i.e. travels the world and speaks a ton of languages) and her whole world changes from there. In itself, not a bad setup, but in execution it falls short. She is cute and you sympathize with her wanting to expand her world, but she shouldn't have been written as such a naïve character in the first place. She is an adult who attends university and has access to the internet in this day and age. She is allowed to go out on her own--nobody is preventing her from gaining new experiences to the point where she doesn't even know some basic things about travelling. Her parents happily send her outside, and yet she's written as if she has zero knowledge of the outside world. In essence, she is treated like a child and not an adult. It's a flaw in the story & writing, not the anime itself.
One of my biggest issues with this series is that it is a romance series that cannot portray romance for the life of it. Basically none of the couples have chemistry and/or personalities as individuals. Yuki falls in love with Itsuomi upon first meeting him and barely having spoken to him. Of course, "love at first sight" isn't uncommon in shows but please give me a reason to understand what she likes about him so much because I don't get it. They also normalize Itsuomi being touchy with her too easily, which is uncomfortable. The two barely interact before they begin dating, which does not convince me as a viewer that I should invest myself emotionally in their relationship. Where is the build-up? Just because he's hot and she's cute and the author wants them to get together doesn't mean the audience is convinced if the romantic progression is not there. Kyouya and Rin ACTUALLY have no chemistry--all we know is she thinks he's hot/cool (again) and he isn't looking for anything... until he might be? Between Shin & Emma, they at least had a backstory to help viewers understand where both of them are coming from. We are shown a tiny sliver of Emma's personality besides being bubbly and SUPER obsessed with Itsuomi despite him clearly avoiding her advances.
Finally, the matter of Oushi. He is rude and constantly crosses boundaries. He will not confront his own feelings even if it kills him. Although he is considerate of Yuki, he refuses to let her be her own person and have her own life. He's controlling and tries to make decisions for her, and yet somehow we are supposed to sympathize with him just because he has had a crush on her since childhood. What?
In essence, I know I raked this anime's characters and romance through the mud, but that's not to say I wasn't rooting for this show. There were many parts of it that I enjoyed, enough for me to rate it a 6/10. However, every anime watcher is looking for something different and this show isn't meant for those who want character-driven shows. They are shallow and simply follow the author's will without the author putting in the effort to convince the readers as such. Enjoy the show!
