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Plot Synopsis

No plot synopsis or other information available for To Heart

Story & Characters

I disclaim: I am actually reviewing To Heart ~Remember my Memories~, the second To Heart series. I had the misfortune of getting stuck translating this show, so I had to watch the entire thing whether I liked it or not. I also disclaim: I have not seen the first To Heart anime, so I know little to nothing about it.

Apparently the first series was a "slice of life" anime. In some ways, ~Remember my Memories~ is trying to be one as well, but for a slice of life anime it makes a lot of attempts at plot. The problem is that it's still moving at the pace of a "slice of life" show, which is to say, slowly. For example, the entire first episode is spent leading up to the fact that the maid robot Multi, introduced in the last series, has returned to the school, but remembers nothing. This is the only significant thing that happens in the entire episode.

Most of the series is divided between episodes focusing on one of the secondary characters, or on episodes focused on Multi. The problem here is that you don't see enough of the secondary characters to get attached to them. This is a show based on a dating game, and as such has a large cast. However, it's also a 13-episode show, so there's very little time to develop said large cast. The result is that you spend entire episodes observing the trials and tribulations of characters you don't actually care about. What character development there is isn't even stellar -- mostly it's relatively shallow and extremely unoriginal. All of the characters eventually come to realize, as all anime characters someday must, that they have to do their best and be true to themselves. No surprises here.

That said, it's not so much that the story in To Heart ~Remember my Memories~ is bad. Rather, it simply fails to be good in all areas. It's so aggressively mediocre that it's difficult to find anything to like about it.

Rating

4 (below average)

Art

The art is the biggest gripe most people have with this show, and I can see why. The style of character designs in the first series, I'm told, diverged significantly from that of the game. They were more rounded and softer and generally very cute.

However, ~Remember my Memories~ stayed closer to the game designs, and have a lot more sharp edges. They're a lot harder on the eye than the old designs were, and even without that comparison the style isn't terribly impressive. Characters' eyes are slanted such that they tend to look like they're sliding down their faces.

Worse, the animation budget was apparently pretty poor. There are an inordinate number of shots wherein only one character moves, or talking-head shots in which only mouths -- and eyes if you're lucky -- are animated at all. When the characters do get to move around, they do it fairly awkwardly. If a character turns their head it inevitably looks deformed at at least one point in the process.

The main character, Hiroyuki, suffers the most from the poor animation. He spends much of the series looking (and sounding, but that's another section) like a cranky old man. In some shots he looks very thin, and in others rather broad. There's little consistency.

For me, the draw of most dating sims is the beautiful character artwork... but if this is the kind of art that appeared in the To Heart series, somehow I don't think it has that advantage.

Rating

3 (poor)

Sound

Voice Acting
The original voice actors from the first To Heart series have mostly returned for this one, and that confuses me, because I've heard the voice acting of the original praised highly. However, the voice acting in ~Remember my Memories~ never rose above mediocre. Some of this was the script -- there's only so many scenes where the dialogue consists only of "Hiroyuki-san!" "Multi!" "Hiroyuki-san!" "Multi!" repeated over and over that a person can take. But some of it was the voice actors themselves.

Hiroyuki again gets the short end of the stick; his voice actor made him sound alternately angry and elderly. You start wondering exactly why every female character in the series is attracted to someone who communicates in shouts and grumbles. (I must admit that I'm biased against characters who mumble; they're appallingly difficult to translate.)

Akari, the female lead, got an inoffensive but not terribly interesting performance -- again possibly due to poor dialogue; it seems like half of her lines consisted of "Hiroyuki-chan?"

Most of the supporting characters were similarly uninteresting. The only two who stuck out were Lemmy and Shiho -- Lemmy for her "English", which, despite her allegedly being American, was both poorly written AND pronounced; and Shiho for her incredibly irritating voice.

In fact, most of the poor rating here is the voice acting's fault.

Background Music
I honestly managed to watch the entire show without the background music coming to my attention at any point. On the one hand, this suggests that it can't have been offensively bad; on the other, it certainly wasn't good enough to catch my attention.

Opening and Ending Music
Both the opening and ending songs are relatively cute, but neither is stunning. The opening grew on me by the time I finished the series.

Rating

4 (below average)

Presentation

There's not a whole lot of humor in ~Remember my Memories~; it's clearly meant as a drama. It's too bad though, because as a drama it mostly falls flat, and a little humor might have helped it along. What attempts at humor there are don't work so well, although a few truly humorous bits slip in there.

Honestly, though, as a whole, this show just doesn't work. It's trying to be a slice of life show, but generally those work for one of two reasons: Because the character development is superb, or because it is fantastically funny (a la Azumanga Daioh). Unfortunately, To Heart ~Remember my Memories~ has lackluster character development and isn't intended to be funny. It also tries to shove in entirely too much plot to work as "slice of life," but the plot is so scattered, and divided by the various individual character-centric episodes, that it never really pulls together.

And that's the big problem in this show: Nothing ever really pulls together for it. If it had even one really outstanding quality I imagine it would become watchable, but every aspect of the show is mediocre to poor, making it extremely difficult to sit through -- not because it's offensively bad, but because it's dull.

Rating

4 (below average)

Final Verdict

3.83 (below average)

Reviewed by hrist, 3y 30wk ago