True Tears & Minami-ke Okawari
January 28, 2008True Tears
Surely the standard harem setting of three school girls being or becoming more or less emotional attached to the male lead isn’t something to write home about, but if it has to be this kind of show True Tears is one example of how it’s done right. The artwork is pretty and the animation of high quality. The scenario is interesting and promises a lot of character development and, maybe the most important factor, the characters themselves are quite likeable, have a well framed background and are (anime-wise) believable. A nice bonus is that they try to liven up the surrounding of the characters by adding lots of NPCs, but sadly the CG-parts don’t really do the trick it because those just don’t look right. And last but not least I really like the SD-characters-outro (SD for the win!).
Altogether a pretty nice watch.
Minami-ke Okawari
Well, so far Minami-ke Okawari isn’t as good as I hoped for but also isn’t as bad as I feared. The animation and character design is of course something to get used to, but their quality doesn’t seem to differ very much from the first season. Good points are more teddy bear involved punishment, the usage of grey for everything Chiaki isn’t thinking about, the appearance of the !s, the keeping of all the seiyuus, the Haruka banchou revival, the strange but interesting intro and many, many more stuff. Bad is the advanced use of (humour-unrelated) fanservice, the lacking of Sensei and Ninomiya-kun and of the warning at the start of an episode, the ugly outro, some other minor things and that the whole thing isn’t as funny as the first season was (so far).
Surely a good and enjoyable series to this point, but it will take a bit more to reach its precursor.
Anime Afterglow 
The lack of any Sensei & Ninomiya-kun action is extremely depressing. But I kind of like the idea of having another studio pick up where the previous one left off, using the same voice cast. If nothing else, it’s an interesting experiment.
true tears is my favourite anime for this winter so far and i haven’t got round to watching minami-ke okawari yet since i don’t really like the art … at last someone subbed it … but i just cant be bothered with it anymore …
Surely something like this can turn out quite well (e.g. Full Metal Panic). Also doing the same better (Kanon) or quite different (Futakoi) can work, but it’s not easy to cotton up with the new version if you liked the original one very much. But I’m more than willing to give Okawari (and Il Teatrino, too, btw) enough time to convince me.
I haven’t watch Okawari yet but I dont have any high expect from it that much.
Four episodes of True Tears is impress. I wish it can reach where ef is, just like how ef defeat anyone in its season.