Orange - 05
Hamasaki's direction feels fairly off for this series. For instance, whatever emotion he's trying to invoke with yet another shitty montage with the blaring band music, it's not working for me.
The writing has proven to be of that shoujo romance kind that I cannot stand, In hindsight Kakeru and Suwa are little more than these typical 'prince' sort of guys that the shy MC falls in love with. Most of the tension and drama comes from people not really talking with one another, and Naho's characterization might explain much of it to some degree but it's still frustrating to follow. Her adversary Ueda is this purposely unlikable bully that's basically just an aid to make us empathize with Naho and her rescuing princes more. Hagita and the other two girls feel like dedicated side characters.
Just about everything surrounding the letter from the future feels badly done. I didn't expect some really poor, on the nose explanation on the time traveling mechanics this episode either. It's weird how Naho didn't even spend much thought on this beforehand. Most egregious is the fact that the show continuously acknowledges that her timeline does in fact change and differ from the future one, just to then sometimes have detailed events line up way too closely anyways, when the chance of that happening after going through so many major changes should be less than minuscule. The future Naho's motivation for this letter is extremely questionable to, though we might still be getting to this. The idea that she actually decides to interfere with current Naho's life this drastically is weird. She pretty much demanded that current Naho doesn't mess up this one particular event because she wants to make the same wonderful memories again...but they are/were pretty much different persons now anyways and after so many changes, why would this even happen similarly to begin with? Really, everything seems messy and questionable about this stuff.
The character designs are a-okay though, so that's nice.
Dropped.
