The Disappointment

A few years ago, I watched an anime series based on an H-game. Despite the nature of most H-games, I had heard that this anime series was a very sweet one, and it was a school based romance-drama. Little did I know that To Heart, the anime series I watched back then, would be one of my all-time favorite anime, changing the way I viewed romantic dramas and how I saw romantic stories in general forever. I even adapted my writing style on it for a few years. Full of excellent characterization, a very sympathetic main male protagonist (despite the fact that he looks bored 90% of the time) and female protagonist, contemplative scenes that belie their complexity as well as general cuteness all around (who wouldn’t find Multi cute?) made this quite the anime series to watch for me.

Imagine my disappointment, two or so years later, when I found that the anime sequel to To Heart, the 13-episode To Heart: Remember My Memories, was nothing like its predecessor. It is true literally and figuratively: everything with the two series is different, except for the voice actors, and the fact that it was based on an H-game. Everything else is different, and I’m sorry to say that it’s a bad kind of different.

Firstly, as we are thrust into the first episode, we see that a year has passed for protagonists Hiroyuki and Akari. The first thing you notice from the getgo is that the character designs have stepped down a notch. Honestly speaking, despite the closer affinity to the original character designs from the game, they’re simply ugly and generic. This especially applies to Hiroyuki himself, who looks entirely different from his other incarnation.

This is compounded by two other things: the change in direction and the change in character personalities. Let’s begin with the first one. The first few episodes alone tell you how much the series has changed in directorial tone. I enjoyed the first series’ leisurely, episodic pace, with the stories being more or less slice-of-life. This new series’ pace is faster, and relies more on 2-3 episode dramatic arcs that feel fast and a bit overdramatic for my taste. It’s more of a conventional style of dramatic storytelling that resembles a telenovela. I’ve never really liked those. Plus, the scale of the stories feel different: in the first series the show was pretty much small-scale and character-focused. Here we get the sense of something bigger, something that’s larger-scale. The slice-of-life aspect is downplayed in favor of dramatic resolution that could have honestly been done better.

For the second point, it is kind of understandable that characters’ personalities would change over time. After all, time has passed. However, the change is too abrupt; I would have settled for character changes to develop over time, in a more subtle manner. The most drastic changes are with Kotone and Hiroyuki; here the result is a jarring transition that spoils the entertainment value from me. Kotone is more assertive, even cheerful, less shy; Hiroyuki turns into a male version of Shiho who screams “Multiiiiiii!” every five minutes. It gets even worse when in a later episode, Kotone semi-goes back into her demeanor in the first series. More confusion ensues.

One grave mistake this series made is to follow its H-game roots too closely – it treats the characters in a ‘harem’ manner - as if we need another damn series with all of the female characters in love with the male protagonist, as is the case here. In the first series Hiroyuki treats the various female characters in different ways, not all involving romantic emotions. For example, he treated Multi in a brotherly, even patronizing manner; he served as a helping hand towards Aoi; he served as someone who was eager to listen in the case of Serika. Kotone was in love with someone else (I won’t spoil who) but in the second series she magically falls in love with Hiroyuki – even if in the first series it was with Akari that she interacted with the most – she barely even spoke with Hiroyuki. Er… yeah. Whatever.

Luckily, the series picks up at around episode 8, when the drama becomes marginally worth watching. It elevates the status of the series from “horrible” to “halfway decent.” It still isn’t that good, though. The only good things I liked from this one was how it made the first series so much better, as well as the voice acting. To Heart fans should avoid this at all costs. Anime fans will see this as another mediocre series, a far cry from the brilliance that was the first one.