Name: captain, this view is pretty and all, but the boat isn't moving
Item: Nisekoi:
Rating: 72
Author: YTPizzer

Waifra

captain, this view is pretty and all, but the boat isn't moving · Waifora

Just when I was gonna praise the first season for being flexible enough to support the source material properly and actually tell the story well, this season comes about and ends up feeling like an extended OVA.

I have a real bone to pick with the sheer prevelance of low committal adaptations and the resulting meandering storylines. Utlimately, you can just sort of view this as slice, and stop thinking about the romance that is meant to be developing, and then you can probably enjoy this, but it 100% does not match the level of quality that the first season achieved. Like many anime, it feels like we end very close to where we started. It doesn't even feel like this season knew it was gonna be the last. We didn't go out in a bang, we decayed with a whimper.

~vaguely spoilery territory, i'm just gonna go over the thing that happened vaguely and give my disorganised thoughts. All I'm gonna really give away though is which characters (existing and new) get focused on and what they vaguely did.~

Spoiler, click to view

I was really not loving onodera's sister at the beginning. Her entire character concept was annoying. She made zero effort to actually hear ichijou out, holding onto everything extremely stubbornly, which makes her difficult to like. Eventually they have her warm up to him in a sort-of sudden moment, and then they just sorta push her to the side as a threat, never really doing anything with her.

I sort of liked kirisaki's mum's arc, i usually enjoy stuff like that where MC "nah, i'd win"s and pulls off some unrealistic shit. They went even harder on this in monogatari. These MCs are very similar.

It was nice that shuu actually got some substance too. He was a really 1 dimensional character until they gave him a little bit of an arc, which was a nice little touch, albeit a little detatched from the rest of the narrative (they couldve sprinkled little hints of it earlier)

onodera herself deserves whatever she wants and if i ever saw her legitimately depressed I would never recover. Although it was disappointing to see that she already felt what it was like to almost loose what she desperately wanted, yet still not muster the courage to tell ichijou. it's all the more reason to show her at least a little more panicked, but she's still her typical shy embarassed self. The plot of the source material couldn't afford to have her being aggressive while ichijou still doesn't even see kirisaki as a potential love interest, so instead of (god forbid) deviating from the source material to support the medium the story is being told in, they just tell a story that goes nowhere, and make you feel like your waiting for something to happen, while it never does.

It's not really right to call this the same show almost, this is more like a spinoff with the way the structure of the show changes.

Ultimately, it's just a bit of a nothing-burger of a season. Like nothing of substance really happens. It's cute, and there's certainly worse ways to spend your time, but its really disappointing after that first season where everything is really well balanced and they keep it alive and interesting.

Honestly, if you enjoyed the first season, weren't only there for the romance, and haven't seen it yet, probably try getting into monogatari. It's really long but the stuff toward the end (RELEASE order, do not watch it any other way) gets really freakin good and it's definitely worth a watch. If this still seems your vibe, go ahead. It's not gonna ruin anything for you, just don't be disappointed if you don't feel like it went anywhere.