What do you mean last episode was the final? That was no final ! How could this ends so abruptly ! Surely they don’t expect to have a second season?!
Animation & Art:
The visual in Sekai-Ichi Hatsukoi was not so bad, but not incredible either. It was something you can expect from a cheap romance show. Using small crudely drawn animation from time to time for comedic relief and expressing facial expression with little comic effect is a cheap way to buy air time. There was never any amazing animation or anything fantastic that just blew my mind in term of beauty, everything was quite normal and meh.
Rating: 6/10
Characters:
Both the character of Takano and Ritsu were amazing to follow, they had an interesting backstory and two completely different personality that were both unique and interesting in their own way. While those two characters were simply amazing to watch every week, it was quite different when we were randomly launched into the universe of a different set of characters. Everytime it happened there was this feeling of deja vu and it was lame, being told the same story with just some small variation is not really interesting. The Characters had slightly different personality, but it still felt like in the end, they were all the same person that think nearly all exactly the same way. It was uninteresting to say the least.
Therefore, big point for the main characters, and minus some points for the side characters.
Rating : 8/10
Original Sound Track & Opening/Closing theme:
While I found the opening to be “ordinary” and that nothing really stand out from it, I really enjoyed the ending theme, While the animation in it was not amazing or nothing out of this world, the music and the effect were well paced to conclude each episode. I never felt the ending to be out-of-place from the last scene I saw, it was always fitting.
Rating: 7/10
Storyline:
The Major problem I see with Sekai-Ichi Hatsukoi’s Story is two things, the first being that the story is divided along the way by two different side story. When I watch an anime that runs since years and years like Bleach, I can understand why there is a filler story that is unrelated to the main story from time to time. But in a show that last for only 12 episodes, I find it kind of ridiculous to have half the episodes be side stories. Why would a 12 episodes long story need fillers? The only reason I can think of is because it doesn’t has enough content to run for a full 12 episodes, which leads to the second problem I had with the show…
… It did not have enough content to run for 12 episodes. Near the last few episode you could feel everything was coming to an end really soon, all the past story had been revealed and things were starting to go well for Takano and Ritsu and this all happen in about 6 episode total. The love story here needed more background or for something else to happen if it were to stay relevant, but now it just feels like we know everything and Ritsu is just being bitchy for the purpose of being bitchy. I have no idea why they would even consider making a second season to conclude the show when they obviously had not even enough content to make a single one to begin with.
While the ~8 episode we had with Takano and Ritsu as main character were interesting, the rest of the story was pure bullshit and destroyed the beauty of the story for me.
Rating: 5/10
Overall Entertainment Value:
The romance between the two main character is well done and all the element are there to make it fun to watch Ritsu continuing to deny his love for Takano even has he is slowly becoming more and more in love with him. But the fact remains that as the show progress, things starts to get a bit repetitive. While I really enjoyed the show at the beginning the fact remains that seeing the same thing happening over and over again gets boring really quickly. Especially when not only do you have to watch some repetitive show, but there are repetitive story within the main repetitive story that makes everything oh so repetitive. In the end, this show would have been far more interesting as a short OVA series.
Rating: 5/10
Conclusion:
First of all, this show is a yaoi romance, many people will lose interest in the show at that point, for the few who are still interested, Sekai-Ichi Hatsukoi present an interesting love story that really show the beauty of a complicated romance. But unfortunately the show story is missing a lot to make it more interesting than some other romance show. The plot is simple and the show starts to run out of content about half way through. That show could have been awesome if it would have kept the first 3 episodes level of content, but after those first few episode it starts to go slowly downhill until the end. Not only does it slowly goes down, but it ends with a cliffhanger that leave you frustrated, but not because you want to see what is next, only because you wanted everything to finally end so you could call it done. Now instead we might see a new season of Sekai-Ichi Hatsukoi even if a lot of show are way more deserving of having the honour.
Final Rating: 6/10
ZeroG signing off