(This review was originally written on June 27th, 2016)
This season, I had only planned to watch Sailor Moon Crystal and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. But a couple of other shows, this one, Shounen Maid, and a few others, caught my attention, and I wound up trying them out. I'm glad to say, they all turned out good, Sansha Sanyou being one such show. Let's face it, the slice-of-life genre nowadays mostly consists of creators trying to make girls come off as unrealistically cute and moe as possible, complete with squeaky voices, ridiculous storylines, pandering, etc. Granted, not all shows are like this, but otakus have become the primary consumers in Japan when it comes to anime, so from a business perspective, usually businesses go for what they know the audience will consume, whether they put out poor quality products or not. Sansha Sanyou definitely isn't a masterpiece, as nothing will ever be, but thankfully, despite its cliche premise, it manages to be better than most moe slice-of-life shows.
Like most moe shows, there isn't really much of a plotline here. All it's really about is three girls from different backgrounds becoming friends right off the bat simply by running into each other: Yoko Nishikawa, the former rich girl whose father's business became bankrupt and is now poor as dirt (and oddly enough, she adjusts to it pretty well), Teru Hayama, the class representative and cat lover who seems nice but supposedly hides some evil dark side, and Futaba Odagiri, the obligatory cheerful and gluttonous girl who does nothing but eat disporportionate amounts of food. Through random shenanigans, inside or outside of school, they somehow manage to become friends. Joining their circle are Shino Sonobe, Yoko's former maid; Yamaji, Yoko's very overprotective former butler, and sometimes random strangers inside and outside of school, such as the local mean girl Serina and her sidekick Asako. Hijinks ensue.
Okay, I need to get this elephant out of the room right now: Yoko's character design looks EXACTLY the same as that of Sumire Hikami from Aikatsu season three! See?
Same shade of purple hair, same hair length, same eye color, same polite personality, same upper class background, even all the way down to the same voice actresses for the Japanese versions! The only differences are their chest sizes and that Yoko is more haughty and Sumire is more timid! I know Sansha Sanyou's manga came out YEARS before Aikatsu did, but come on, you can't not notice the blatant mirror images the character designs create! It's almost like the creators of Aikatsu completely ripped off Yoko's design to make Sumire, and the fact that the Sansha Sanyou anime came out THIRTEEN YEARS after its manga was created, and a couple years after Aikatsu, doesn't excuse the similarities either, so that has to say something!
Alright, back to the important stuff. The animation is, for the most part, quite good. It's really smooth a lot of the time, especially when it comes to fluid movement, and when characters move, they move. The character designs are a bit more down to earth this time around, and aren't ridiculously exaggerated, from the more restrained hair colors to more naturalistic hair styles and realistic anatomical proportions, which is very refreshing. There is one problem with the animation, though: it's too bright! It's like someone turned the brightness almost up to its highest setting, and I'm pretty sure that amount of brightness can hurt someone's eyes. I personally had no problem with it, and eventually got used to it, but I can imagine others not being able to adjust well to it. The music...isn't much to write home about. The opening and ending themes are far too squeaky and fast paced, but the background music is pretty nice, and set the mood and atmosphere well, though it still isn't particularly memorable. Sorry, but there isn't much to say about it.
The characters...this is a hard one. For the most part, they're arguably a mixed bag. They're not complex or anything like that, but they're decent enough, with some not so well-off exceptions. Teru and oddly enough, the local mean girl, Serina, happen to be the best characters. The rest of them are pretty funny, albeit still bland and not full of much flavor, but decent enough, and they're definitely not bad. However, there are three exceptions: Futaba and those annoying blue haired twins. Futaba is just a complete non-entity as a main character. Her only character traits are that she's cheerful and loves eating. That's it. There's nothing else to her. Literally ALL she does is act cheerful and eat disproportionate amounts of food in every single episode and doesn't contribute to anything at all, exacerbated by her extremely irritating voice. Seriously, her voice actress sounds like she's trying WAY too hard to sound cute but comes off as grating and shrill instead. Megumi Han can pull it off, but Futaba's seiyuu just can't. But even worse are those blue haired twins who just hate Futaba simply for the fact that she wins all those all-you-can-eat contests and don't have any other personality or character than that. I think the show could have benefited had those twins been cut out of the story, because not only are they completely useless and annoying, they don't add anything to either the other characters or the story itself. So...Futaba and the Tsuji twins: worst characters. The rest of them are...decent.
The story itself is very episodic in nature and there's nothing to really get invested in. It's just the three girls going through school and life and having fun and being friends. But I can definitely give it this: the situations most of the time aren't NEARLY as boring or ridiculous as those of...I don't know, Kiniro Mosaic. At least the girls act like regular human beings most of the time (sans Futaba and the blue haired twins) and aren't completely made up of pandering moe traits! Plus, the comedy was actually surprisingly good. I have to admit, the jokes about the token sorta-loli maid Shino, who is actually in her thirties but stopped growing, were actually pretty funny and handled very tastefully. I do find the final episode to be...really odd. What was the point of it? Everything in it just seemed to be thrown in there without much thought or substance whatsoever. Oh well. It's better than other final episodes I've seen (Kimi to Boku and Uta no Prince-sama season one, anyone?).
So...yeah, not the best slice of life moe anime out there, but it definitely stands out from the bad ones. If you can get past the bright animation style and some useless characters, it's a pretty good little time killer.