Guillotine

Okay, so here’s the situation… I’m sitting around having just watched the final episode of Ghost Hunt, and still waiting for new episodes of Black Cat and xxxHolic to be added to my OnDemand. So, After surfing through Funimation’s video portal for something to watch I happened across Rumbling Hearts. Well… I’ll check it out… Seems like a typical high school romance anime like To Heart, To Heart 2, or Shuffle. It’s also a short run anime (14 episodes) so perfect for the in between time while waiting for the anime I’m currently following to continue.

The rest after the jump…

After watching the first episode I felt my initial impressions were correct… Typical… One guy that several girls are interested in, and drama will ensue… Or so I thought… The first episode did confuse me a bit as normally with these types of shows the guy is inevitably clueless to the feelings of the girls around him, and you come to expect that it’s going to drag out until the end of the series when he finally realizes and has to make a choice. The situation here is different… These girls are kind of bold, and the male character is pretty much in the know about everyone’s feelings rather than just shuffling around aimlessly collecting a harem for himself.

Okay… So the main characters… Takayuki Narumi is the boy that is the center of everyone’s attention… Haruka Suzumiya seems at first to be the typical Akari Kamegishi type character that is cute and shy with short pink hair and ribbons… And finally Mitsuki Hayase who is the athletic tough girl character. There are several other interesting characters, but I’ll just stick to the main three here.

Of course you can see where things appear to be going, and I probably wouldn’t even be writing about this anime if it had turned out to be what it appears to be, but there is a rather nasty twist just a few episodes in that makes this story a bit different. I’m really trying to avoid spoilers in this review, but I can say that I haven’t been affected quite as much before as this. I’ll just say that the way the situation was portrayed made me feel like I’d been punched in the chest. The first time I’ve had an anime actually made me forget to breathe for a time.

Another thing that makes this story a little different is the pacing… After the above mentioned twist things get completely confusing leaving the viewer wonder just what is going on, and just as you start to understand everything is when the situation begins to fall apart thus you don’t get much time to get your bearing before the story moves on.

The story is based on the video game of the same name which was a dating sim… It was then adapted into manga, and finally the anime. Being based off a dating sim. The anime shows it’s roots by the story being decision based… Each choice the characters make affect the way the story’s path unfolds. Knowing this might make the story a bit easier to deal with as it’s kind of difficult to pick up that each action causes such huge consequences that seem to be occurring, and are rather unforgiving… Or in other words… The plot follows the style of a game in that everything carries the story forward with no going back to fix the wrong choices… What the characters do are stuck with them to the end.

Now… Speaking of the end… I was left very unsatisfied and rather angry with the original ending. I guess you could say that it was too much like real life… Even though they disguised it as a sort of happy ending where everyone reached closure it was blatantly obvious that everyone was left hurt, and that rather than resolving the situation everyone simply chose their path and moved on. Like I said… It’s kinda like things work out in real life… We just take what we get and move on… No noble acts, no truly happy endings. The problem here is that a fictional story is supposed to give us a short escape from reality… It isn’t supposed to end the way things really do, but the way we would like them to if given the power to control our lives.

Apparently I am not the only one who felt this way because after a couple OVAs that followed several of the side characters there was another 4 episode OVA titled: Kimi ga Nozomu Eien ~Next Season~ which goes back a bit before the original ending, and shows what would have happened if different choices were made. It’s pretty much an alternate ending to the original series, and in my opinion was very much needed. This is the way things should have gone, and personally it left me satisfied that the story was complete.

A bit of a warning… If you are a “manly man” who shuns all things cute and are of the belief that your manhood can be sucked out of you by simply watching a dramatic and emotional story then you may wanna pass on this. I consider myself a pretty normal dude, and typically laugh at people watching shows or movies with a box of tissues on hand, but this one made me tear up several times, and I think you’d have to be someone who’s heart was left out at the factory if this one doesn’t affect you at least a little. It’s actually the way it affected me that made me have to write about it.

So that is my spoiler free take on the story… It’s hard to write about it without giving anything away. The original story is concluded with the Kimi ga Nozomu Eien ~Next Season~ OVA… Which if you want to watch (and I recommend you do if you have watched the original series) you will have to settle for a torrented fansub as the OVA has not been released in the US at this point. Just so you know the fansub by BakaWolf is excellent.

There are also the spin off OVAs: Akane Maniax which are 3 episodes following Haruka’s little sister Akane. Also there is the 7 episode spin off called AyuMayu Theater which follows the antics of the two waitresses Ayu and Mayu who act as comic relief in the original series. I haven’t talked about those characters in this review, but I would like to say that in the English dub Luci Christian and Monica Rial did an amazing job with those two.

As for the future… While the main story wrapped up two of the characters there is still a possibility to follow some other characters who were just left hanging, so there could be a chance of more OVAs in the future.