Review of The World is Still Beautiful

I decided to watch this one after seeing all the praises it got here and after watching TBH I'm not sure why it got so many such praises in the first place. This seems like an attempt to make a combination of both shoujo and shounen genres but it ends-up with a show that is essentially jack of all trades, master of none. Background: It's a story about the king on the sun kingdom, who managed to conquer most of the world even though he's still a child, and the princess of the rain kingdom, a poor country and one of the last places that remainautonomous. The sun kingdom, as the name implies, always has sunshine and rain is something that people have heard of but never seen, so the king pretty much demands to marry one of the rain kingdom princesses, who have the unique ability to call the rain by singing songs. He initially treats the (very tomboyish) princess as a play toy but as time goes on a love story develops between them.

Why do I think it's just not that good? First because the shoujo love story is "cliche by the book", nothing but nothing makes it really unique, he treats her bad, he then falls in love with her, they have difficulties because of other etc. We've already seen all that, multiple times. So yeah, she can make it rain but that hardly plays a part in the development of the story. The fantasy and some swords that you see there appear as though they were put there just to avoid being a typical shoujo with no uniqueness at all, unfortunately without much success.

Art is great, no complaints here. Regarding sound, apart from the opening and ending themes (which are nice) the show has that thing of calling the rain by song so it's disappointing that the princess only sings one song that calls the rain, which you will hear over and over in almost every episode, to the point that it actually starts getting a little annoying.

Overall if you like cliche shoujo go ahead but if you're looking for shoujo with an actual twist then I don't think it really has that.