Love triangles and myself don’t have the best relationship. They’re often predictable, usually get nowhere and really like to distract from the main point of a series. True Tears shows that things can be done differently, though. This series has really been built around a love-triangle, and somehow, it’s managed to avoid the pitfalls that has caused the demise of so many series.

The key is good scriptwriting. The series is originally based upon a visual novel, though the creators made the smart decision to just ignore the storyline and come up with their own. True Tears is a slow series, but because it’s slow, it’s able to really dive into the minds of its characters. The result delivers, because the characters in this series are deep.

This is one of these series where the characters and their intentions can’t be easily described in one sentence. A major theme of this series is sorting out your own feelings, and feelings like that aren’t that simple to describe. Shinichiro, our main male lead also keeps hopping from one girl to the other, making the viewer wonder about who he’ll end up choosing until the final episode. The side-characters also for once aren’t stereotypes. The best friend has an actual personality and his own problems, the main character’s father and mother play a big role in the series as well. There’s just one character whose role remains ambiguous throughout the series: Aiko. I’m still not sure what her purpose actually was.

The visuals are another reason to check out this series, because they look absolutely gorgeous. A lot of attention has been put in the animation, and you can see that this series has received a big budget to work with. Even though there are definitely better series, True Tears remains a worthy series of your time.

And so it has ended. We finally know who Shinichiro ends up with, though I’ll refrain from mentioning her in the first paragraph in order to avoid spoilers showing up in the blog-aggregators. I can’t say that this was the best episode of the series, but that’s only natural. In the end, this series’ best moments were in the middle, while the final episodes were more like one huge aftermath, and much less tense.

So in the end, Hiromi has won. To be honest, I only saw it coming when Shinichiro openly said to Noe that he loved Hiromi. In the end, Noe helped him to take off, and he’s very grateful to her for that, though it’s someone else he loves. A hit on the head was also exactly what Noe needed, and it made her reflect the stupid things she did. It might have hurt a bit, but she’s now managed to put herself over Shinichiro. In the aftermath, we also see that she’s finally found herself a couple of good friends.

I must say that it’s definitely been an interesting experience, to blog a show I usually wouldn’t blog. In the end, the biggest reason for me to do it was that it was directed by the director of Simoun, and he’s really proven himself again with this series. Instead of mind-blowing, True Tears is subtle, and shines through its deep characters. It by no means has the right to call itself equal to Simoun, but nonetheless it does remain one of the best love-triangles I’ve seen. His next works will strangely enough be directing the third season of Kyo Kara Maoh, which gives me a strange sort of curiosity toward that series, but I guess that I’ll just wait till the second season of Code-E to see the guy’s work again. (really, something’s telling me that the upcoming summer-season will be awesome).

Ah, finally I had the chance to watch another episode. This episode can basically be called “Eva the Adventure”, as Alice basically didn’t make any appearance in it at all. Instead, it tells about the origin of the dragon-house, and why Sheila started living with Eva in the first place.

It was quite a surprise to find out that the dragon house originally belonged to Eva, and not Sheila. It started as a pet dragon she took care off, and during one incident it got hit by some kind of laser-beam and grew many times its size. Like the other episodes of this OVA, it was a bit rough around the edges, but I’ve long since understood that for Arusu the Adventure, it’s the big picture that matters, and not the small one, because this episode does give quite some interesting background to Eva.

And as it turns out, Sheila actually started living with Sheila for not that deep of a reason. She just wanted to be near Eva due to the fact that she got a flying dragon house from out of nowhere, and she saw the potential in Eva to grow. That also explains why she was so cold to Eva, even though they lived together. They weren’t good friends at all, and I can understand how Eva would grow on Sheila’s nerves because of her uncertainty.

Studio 4C seriously needs to start working on another tv-series. These guys are really talented at storytelling, though they spend most of their times on just short stories and movies. Mahou Shoujotai showed that they are very well able to deliver a full-length anime. Now that they’ve finished working on Tekkon Kinkreet, Arusu the Adventure and Genius Party, they should be already working on their next unannounced projects. Please let it be a tv-series!