kimikiss pure rouge review

stats

# episodes: 24, oct 2007 – mar 2008
anidb rating: 7.56 (279 votes)
my rating: 7.50

thoughts

i have to say that this series started off with a bang, but ended with a sputter. in the first few eps, mao-neechan came back from france to stay with her childhood friend kouichi as her parents were still overseas, and this was because she could prepare herself for entry into a local university; and the second male lead, kazuki, got kissed out of the blue by futami-chan, a tensai shoujo. things looked pretty interesting at the start indeed, but..

why can’t i be involved in these, um, biological “experiments”!?

the story went downhill mid-series – even i, a person crappy at predicting relationships between people in real life and film, was able to predict that kazuki ended up with futami (and not sakino, although i liked her character more) and also kouichi ended up ditching hoshino-san for mao-neechan!

that means, the story is way too predictable!

too many hints were dropped – for the kouichi x mao-neechan pairing:

• mao-neechan kissed kouichi’s forehead even when she was going out with kai-kun.
• she eventually declared her fondness for kouichi and broke up with kai.
• kouichi acting like an idiot around hoshino-san when mao-neechan was around.
• and most importantly – kouichi never called hoshino-san by her first name, even when they were dating! if there were three newtonian laws in harem anime, the first one would surely be “if the main protagonist isn’t on a first-name basis with his kanojo, they won’t end up together by the end of the anime series.” can anyone think of an anime that bucks this trend? haha =P

and for the kazuki x futami-chan pairing:

• kazuki always seeks out futami-chan in school, for instance eating her crisps with mayo and honey (eww) and drinking her coffee in the 200ml beaker.
• sakino calling kazuki and futami out to the park so that they could end the frostiness between them. (therein lies the biggest mystery of the anime – i thought futami didn’t like sakino to the extent of deleting her from her mobile phone addressbook, so why would futami answer sakino’s request to meet her at the park? weird..)
• him going to her house to confess his feelings. that sealed the deal!

(by the way kazuki x futami violates the first law of harem anime – i never heard futami called “eriko” by anyone. maybe kazuki shouldn’t be considered the main protagonist? =P)

and on top of being predictable, the art is kinda low budgety.

the background’s not detailed, the expression of the characters look weird, and the food doesn’t look good – i mean, shijou-san has a whole team of chefs working for her, and that’s the best they can do? fail! haha.

nana-chan and narumi-chan was supposed to provide comedy relief, but their frogs seem to irritate the hell out of me. am i the only one who wants to boil juliet-chan and iwao-kun and eat them with their owners’ udon?

having said that, it does have funny moments (i like the chemistry between mao-neechan and kouichi!), and moments where one goes “awwww..” (kazuki’s confession was so sweet!) so it’s not that bad. watch this when your anime stores are on the low side! =)

ps biological fact-of-the-day – frogs don’t kiss! . the males call for the females with their deep ribbety calls, and then the males mount the females that approach them. the males grip the sides of the female tightly and fertilization occurs externally. in terms of size, juliet-chan should be bigger than iwao-kun as well =P