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May 04 2014

Categories: general review
Tagged: nisekoi, one week friends

8 Comments »

Olympus Has Fallen? White House Down? Dante’s Peak? Volcano? The Legend of Hercules? Hercules? Mamotte Shugogetten? Belldandy?

I think of Nisekoi as a poor man’s Love Hina. Nisekoi is a clone that comes a decade after, and it doesn’t do anything differently enough for me to think of it as anything but a clone. I guess there’s not much innovation in the “forgotten childhood promised one” genre, but that’s what I thought about the “burning hot-blooded giant” robot genre until Gurren Lagann punched that genre in the face or even Madoka redefining magical girls after Nanoha redefined it after Sakura. But that’s what separates them from the thousand or so anime series that have aired in the past decade.

The three major differences between Nisekoi and Love Hina, as I see it, are: One, Keitaro is to Todai as Ichijou is to finding his promised one. Love Hina works a lot better in that Keitaro doesn’t spend every episode pining for a girl he vaguely remembers nor does every other episode end with a low calorie (many cases, zero calorie) cliffhanger about said girl. Great, he has a girl. But the dude is more focused on getting into college. I feel like Nisekoi could be a lot better if the focus were on Chitoge’s and Ichijou’s fake relationship, but it’s given lip service at best. It’s a complication to his pursuit of a girl he desires so much, yet can’t remember her name. It’s a bad Craigslist missed connection. The whole fake relationship feels more like a cheap gag and gimmick rather than being central to the plot, which is the opposite of how Keitaro’s entrance into Todai is handled.

Second, actual fanservice. In an age of anime where sexually assaulting your daughters is not only acceptable but encouraged, Nisekoi has some lackluster fanservice, especially for a fanservice harem series from a studio that normally isn’t shy about fanservice. Great! We get an episode at a hot spring, but Love Hina takes place at a hot spring. I’m not asking for that level (or even Sora no Otoshimono level) of fanservice, but Maria Holic had more. This is a problem. (I mean, you could argue that Keitaro blasting off again is a clone of Team Rocket because of how often it happened.) I think Shaft got too caught up in figuring out how to make dialogue between two characters seem interesting with special drawing skillz that they forgot the go-to rule: when in doubt, stick a heroine in a meido outfit. Ichijou talking to Onedera about a key is boring. Ichijou talking to Onedera about a key wearing a meido outfit is much more exciting. And do we need a reason for it? It’s Shaft! Since when did they need a reason for anything?

Third, and this is the key one, there’s very little of the harem lead actually leading his haremettes. In the course of Love Hina, Keitaro improves the lives of Shinobu (giving her self-confidence), Suu (fixing her family issues), Motoko (the big one– helped her become an actual person instead of an anime caricature), Kitsune (at least she didn’t die), Mutusmi (getting her melonpan into Todai), Sarah (for being a father slash creepy pedophile figure), and Kanako (doing more for her than Kyosuke has done for Kirino). The only exception is Naru, whose life took a drastic change for the worse because he married her. They both go to Todai, he becomes a famous archeologist, and she becomes the manager of a hot springs and gets left behind? Anyway, Ichijou has barely helped any of the haremettes. All he’s done is make haremettes fall in love with him and drag them into his pit of despair over a locket. Nothing like Keitaro consoling Shinobu about her parent’s divorce.

Four, yes, fucking four, because I can, is that for a show to not be the homeless man’s version of ______, it has to do enough differently. Right now, it’s hard to look at One Week Friends as anything other than a homeless man’s version of ef or a homeless man’s version of Fifty First Dates. There’s only three possible places where One Week Friends can go once the notebook was brought out (Seriously, why couldn’t she have just taped a podcast for herself every week? “Now on Kaoricast Week 5, I got a crepe with Yuki.” It’s 2014. Do something different. I can’t wait for episode eight where she discovers Yuki’s eroge magazine collection now…): it can either end with Kaori losing the notebook, and then realizing she doesn’t need it to remember Yuki (which I’m not sure can surpass ef, unless a sheep is involved), her never regaining memory but chooses to love Yuki anyway (Fifty First Dates), or she turns into the Ultimate Weapon in order to stop an alien invasion (Saikano). There’s only these possibilities. The only reason I would watch One Week Friends is to see which it ends up with… though it could just drag it on for three seasons… which would be horrible. Keep in mind ef had two plotlines going at once too, as well as plenty of Shaft being Shaft.

(I like how in that old ef post, I referenced Love Hina: “What exactly is Yuko’s role in the whole story? Similar to the chorus in a tragedy? The best use of a Greek tragedy-like chorus in anime, I kid you not, are the old men who live in the town in Love Hina.” Yes, that proves my point: a decade of blogging, and Love Hina is still relevant. A few years from now, Nisekoi will go the way of Gun x Sword. What fate will await One Week Friends? Will it be the next Final Approach or the next Battle Athletes?)

That’s how I see Nisekoi. It’s going to drag on because it can, and because it doesn’t have a better place to go to. Will it be like Love Hina where, shockingly, there’s more than one promised girl? Or will the show do something different. I’m hoping for the ending where Ichijou finds out he’s promised to half his harem, and he picks a girl not in his harem. Maybe his teacher. Or Claude. That would be for the best. Because finding out Onedera, Chitoge, and Marika were all promised and then picking any combination of them… boring. As boring as not picking any of them and letting it drag on. Maybe I’m oversimplifying, but for Nisekoi to evolve the promised girl genre, it needs a different, memorable ending… full of boats, Claude, aliens, and maybe even some meido fanservice.