true tears review

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# eps: 13, jan 2008 - mar 2008
anidb rating: 8.25 (487 votes)
my rating: 9.50

thoughts

was very tempted to give this anime a perfect score of 10 actually, as this anime has great depth in its storytelling, interesting characters, well done art and a great OP and ED to boot. my only grouse was that it was a bit rushed near the end, depriving audiences of how shinichirou’s and hiromi’s relationship developed after his confession!

the storyline isn’t complicated at all - in the first few episodes, one could tell that three girls had a crush on shinichirou: noe, hiromi and aiko. as the story progressed, shinichirou mistakenly thought hiromi liked noe’s brother, jun, as hiromi always gave shinichirou the cold shoulder. as jun noticed that his imouto is interested in shinichirou, jun onegai-ed shinichirou to go out with noe, which he agreed, on the condition that jun was to date hiromi as well.

while this was happening, aiko decided to come clean and confessed to miyokichi that she agreed to go out with him simply because that meant that she’ll be seeing his best friend - shinichirou - more often as well. i’m not sure whether this reason was used in other romance anime as well, but i found it pretty interesting. i’m pretty sure most viewers would either belong to the noe camp or the hiromi camp, i was actually rooting for aiko to miraculously beat the odds and end up with shinichirou =) too bad that didn’t happen!

although the storyline’s fairly uncomplicated, i love how it’s delivered - in the first few episodes, i was clueless as to why shinichirou’s mother was so antagonistic towards hiromi, to the extent of tricking hiromi into believing that she was shinichirou’s half-sister, thus breaking hiromi’s hopes of having a relationship with shinichirou (that was when i thought aiko had the best chance of beating the odds, by the way =P).

it wasn’t until the last ep when it was hinted that shinichirou’s mother, shinichirou’s father and hiromi’s mother was in a similar situation a long time ago. the green-eyed monster within shinichirou’s mother wanted to make life difficult for hiromi because she nearly lost shinichirou’s father to her love rival - hiromi’s mother. although this was quite petty of shinichirou’s mother to react in such a way, instead of hating her for that, i’m actually impressed with the fact that her emotions was so realistically portrayed in this anime! it was a relief that hiromi’s mother came to the realization that she was being too nasty, and subsequently patched up with hiromi.

i love the way the parallel was so subtly brought across - in a scene, shinichirou was seen asking his father “when do you cry?”, and he responded by saying:

and these were the exact same words shinichirou uses to break up cleanly with noe later.

“but, when i see you, my heart wavers.”

while shinichirou was making up his mind, shinichirou’s mother paid a visit to hiromi, and delivered a classic one-liner:

“waiting.. does take a lot of energy, doesn’t it?

well-scripted, and beautifully delivered! i loved the fact that we couldn’t be really sure of who shinichirou would end up dating until the last half of the last episode, loved the fact that shinichirou is not stereotyped as a wimpy male character who somehow commands the hearts of his harem, and lastly loved the fact that the characters in the story are so believable. kudos to the scriptwriter of this anime!

art-wise, another big plus point to this anime is its well-done art, which is occasionally interspersed with pretty watercolour stills (i had the feeling they went overboard in inserting too many stills in the last ep, but whatever, that’s fine with me).

in conclusion, true tears is well-worth the time you’d be spending on it, and i hope you’d enjoy the ride as much as i enjoyed writing this review on it =)

ps biological fact-of-the-day: domestic chickens can’t really fly well, but the lighter ones are still able to fly up trees. chickens fly with the aim of either exploring their surroundings or fleeing from perceived danger - i presume noe thinks that raigomaru was exploring his surroundings, but in fact was fleeing away from danger =P