White Album Review

Alright, so I just recently finished watching White Album, two seasons consisting of 13 episodes each.  By the time I finished watching the anime, I had the feeling that I just finished watching an anime mix of Tari Tari, School Days (minus the beheading,) and Kanon, with a small hint of Durarara!! (If you haven’t watched those, they’re pretty decent, though School Days has a bad reputation, I still think it’s worth one watch through.)

Stay with me here and I’ll try to do this with as few spoilers as I can.

Throughout the anime, the protagonist, Touya, Fujii, is constantly troubled by how little time he gets to spend with his girlfriend Yuki, Morikawa due to her job as an idol.  This provides Touya with a lot of room for his infidelity.  Touya himself is a good guy, though sometimes he’s fairly rough around the edges, especially towards Haruka Kawashima, his childhood friend.

Yuki Morikawa is the main heroine for the anime.  She is sweet, gentle, trusting, and fairly obedient and aspires to become an idol.  In the anime, she is only made aware of one case of infidelity conducted by Touya with her co-worker Rina Ogata

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I’m sort of bored with Character Introductions so if you want to read the rest you can go to Wikipedia.

So like most anime based on a Visual Novel it starts out with the bases behind the whole anime, which seems to be Yuki wanting to become an idol, it proceeds to cycle through the heroine introductions then goes through to solve their particular situations.  While this happens, the main plot slowly develops in the background which happens to be the situation around Yuki.  The anime comes with easy to tell plot devices, which to me was a good selling point as I’m one of those audience members that likes to guess at what is going to happen down the road.

*** PLEASE STOP HERE IF YOU WISH TO AVOID SPOILERS***

Now for problems I had with the anime.  I enjoyed watching it overall, but I’m not picky on what I watch when it comes to anime, as long as it has one of two requirements, either a good plot or good artwork.  I really wanted the infidelity between Touya and Yuki’s manager to be leaked out to Yuki, but the plotline leading up to that is quickly quashed due to a certain character’s stupidity and quick thinking on the part of an acquaintance of Touya.  Though late in the game, this does assist in furthering the plot.  Another problem I had was, no one openly said how Haruka’s brother died.  All that’s given to us is a flashback, a lie, and an open guess.

Alright, let us get off that topic now and onto things I liked.  Throughout the anime frequently found myself feeling a multitude of emotions, sometimes hate for Touya, pity for Yuki, sorrow, confusion, and happiness.  Now I’m not one to cry for an anime but the death of Touya’s father hit me pretty hard, though it didn’t seem like a big deal to the characters.  Next are the characters, I loved how the anime connected them all together.  It made for an entertaining show when you realize just what the hell is going on.

Overall I enjoyed my experience watching this anime, and thinking back on it, the episodes ended with quite the amount of suspense, but I marathoned it so I wasn’t quite as affected by that.  I would definitely say that this anime is worth the watch if you’re into the whole daily life romance sort of anime.  I also enjoyed that it wasn’t about high school students for the most part, as that’s what most anime seems to be directed to nowadays.

My rating for this anime: 7.5/10