Fortunately, I’m not in the hater group with this one. Unfortunately though, I didn’t particularly like it either, and that leaves me in a sort of in-between greyish area which makes writing a review about it sort of difficult. I still hate number ratings, but seeing how you guys actually use them for averages and such, I suppose I’ll give this series a number rating. I’m doing so at the start of the review though so I can spend the rest of it, explaining my rating expecially because it looks like everyone else uses an entirely different rating scale than I do. I give AnoNatsu a 5/10. Which is not exactly bad, but just a very average rating. Because that’s exactly what AnoNatsu is, average. idk if we’re doing spoiler warnings on these reviews or not, because I don’t see them on anyone else’s and I’m pretty sure I didn’t put one on my Btoom review. There will be spoilers though, because I want to rant about very specific things, such as the ending.
Plot
I said that AnoNatsu was average about 7 times already, right? So by now you should already be able to guess the main premises of the plot without me even needing to say it. Yep, it’s a sudden girlfriend appearance plot. You have your alien that pops into the protagonists life, they instantly fall in love, and there is a love triangle involving a tsundere childhood friend. Although I will take a point off of AnoNatsu’s average block for actually resolving the love polygon towards the end. And another one for having a very decisive protagonist, which is quite rare in something like this.
Then we have the whole movie filming thing going on which feels pointless. Nobody is serious about making the movie and it just feels like some random unimportant thing that they decided to do. Probably much like what went on behind the scenes to produce AnoNatsu. Then of course we have the actual ending which was just a complete mess of logic and almost completely changes the atmosphere of the whole show from a sort of semi-serious drama into slapstick action with ill thought out plot elements. We have some sort of space government that must retrieve alien-chick (forgot her name already because all the characters in this show were so bland) because she made contact with the people on Earth. So their solution is to send a couple of stupid-ass looking giant spaceship things and cause an enormous amount of mayhem on the very planet they aren’t supposed to be on. Then of course the MIB come out of nowhere, for no reason…
Characters
If I was a plot fanatic, then I’d probably hate this show, but I’m not. The main thing for me in any series is character quality, and this is mainly where the averageness of this series imminates from. The characters of AnoNatsu are the very definition of average. You can’t hate them because they aren’t awful, but you also can’t love them because they aren’t great, or even good. Most of them have very little background and pretty cliche, shallow personalities such as the tsundere childhood friend, the quiet nice girl, the mysterious upper classman, and so on. In fact, I couldn’t even care about the childhood friend getting dumped near the end, because her character was so poorly developed that it was impossible to feel anything about her. She could have died and it would have made no difference to me.
The most unique character is probably the nono thing whose name I consistantly forget.
But even that thing had problems mixing into the whole series and we never really find out why it even exists. Was it the pilot? Was it some sort of robot? Was it a part of the ship itself? Or was it just some alien? Nobody knows, because apparently, nothing in this series was important.
Enjoyment
If AnoNatsu dropped it’s attempt at drama, and stuck with pure comedy or parody, it might have had a better chance. In fact, I seems like they tried to change their mind half-way through the series, but it was already too late by then and instead they just gave the series a genre identity crisis.
I can rant about the technical downfalls of the plot and characters all day long, but at the end of an episode, what’s important is whether or not you were hammering the fast-forward button throughout the series. Even with a plot hole or two and some super cliche characters, AnoNatsu managed to stay right on the edge of still being entertaining. I almost skipped some parts of it, but I never actually did. And that is exactly why these type of series continue to pop up. They are a safe and proven way for studios to not lose their asses. Plus, if you’re new to anime, the whole “already been done” “everything is cliche” problems don’t exist, and this type of series might be new and exciting to you since you aren’t an elitist faggot like everyone else. Yet.
So back to my rating of 5/10. I enjoyed it, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone and I’ll probably completely forget about it and fuse it into my memory with the 50 other series that I’ve seen that are the exact same thing. That is what a 5/10 means on my scale.
The Verdict
The Bad:
I’m a human being, trust me.
