Review of Kokoro Connect

I know I'm way too late to be posting this review on a nearly 8 year old show - my very first review that I will be posting on here at that, but whatever. When I first watched Kokoro Connect around the time it was airing, I think my first impression was that I liked it (even though I probably didn't watch all of it very thoroughly), but after re-watching it many years later, I was quite surprised and disappointed by how bad it is... no, I wouldn't necessarily call it bad, but it is incredibly mediocre. This review will cover the entire series, includingthe OVAs that continue the storyline, and it will contain a few spoilers, but I will keep it as brief as I can because I don't want to waste too much of my time discussing the utter waste of time that is this show. Anyway, here we go.

Forced drama. Forced drama everywhere. If there was one word to sum up this show, it would be “melodramatic”. And that’s saying a lot, considering I am one of the most sentimental people you could meet, but Kokoro Connect didn’t do much for me, despite its ceaseless screaming for sympathy points. I meant that last part half-literally, because every damn character in the show was screaming their head off every other minute of every episode out of frustration, self-loathing, anger or sorrow, or whatever other emotion that I didn't care about because I felt too detached from the characters to actually care much about any of them. Look, I know that considering these are teenagers that were thrown suddenly into a whole inexplicable predicament of uncontrollable and unpredictable body-switching, telepathy that involuntarily revealed their darkest thoughts and deepest hidden feelings to their closest friends, time/growth regression that rendered them quite helpless, it’s perfectly normal and understandable for them to overreact and lose their heads over these occurrences and other smaller things, but there are so many more better ways to handle and portray drama besides making the characters scream themselves hoarse for several long minutes straight, with an occasional mix of physical violence there. There are quite a few words to describe this show, but “subtle” certainly is not in its vocabulary. It just tells you everything and spoon-feeds you all the details without actually showing it most of the time, or instead choosing to make the characters TELL you before revealing any context or physical evidence or even any foreshadowing at all. For instance, the whole thing with Nagase and Taichi’s romantic feelings towards each other that would’ve been completely unnoticeable had Inaba not mentioned it out loud, or the thing with Yui’s androphobia that we only get the chance to learn about when Aoki casually brings it up with no context whatsoever, and much more. This show might as well be yelling at the audience: “THIS GIRL IS TERRIFIED OF MEN, PITY HER, THIS POOR TRAUMATIZED CREATURE; AND THIS OTHER GIRL HERE IS SUFFERING FROM AN IDENTITY CRISIS AND IS ACTING LIKE A TOTAL BITCH BECAUSE *GASP* SHE WAS ACTUALLY LIKE THAT ALL ALONG AND WAS ONLY HIDING HER TRUE SELF, FEEL SORRY FOR HER NOW BECAUSE SHE IS A VICTIM OF A BROKEN HOME THAT DESTROYED HER”, and other ramblings about the rest of the characters and their mostly contrived problems. If there's anything this show is good at, it is creating a myriad unnecessary misunderstandings between the characters and TELLING instead of SHOWING - seems like someone didn't pay attention to the crucial yet basic tip of "show, don't tell" that any other decent writer would actually listen to.

Speaking of the characters, there is... well, not much to speak of. They can all be described in generic archetypes: Taichi the nice guy/selfless white knight, Aoki the useless “comic relief sidekick”, Inaba the cool tough girl, Yui the cute tsundere (kind of, at least toward Aoki), and finally Nagase the genki girl with a surprisingly dark past/hidden real personality.

Animation and soundtrack were alright, nothing too special, but the voice acting was great, especially Sawashiro Miyuki who excelled at portraying Inaba's character and conveying her emotional turmoil.

The concept of the show is really interesting and quite original, but the writers just butchered the story and characters, who are supposed to be the main devices to carry the story ahead but somehow managed to make the story boring. I didn’t want to be too harsh because ultimately I was somewhat still entertained by the show, enough to keep watching, but for the most part, especially through the second half, I felt like I was dragging through each episode just to get to the conclusion, which was... okay, I guess. Extremely mediocre and predictable is all I can say. The villain (who would make absolutely no difference to the story even if he wasn’t shoehorned into it for the sake of thrills and extra drama) disappears without a single trace along with the problems that he plagued the main characters with, and the main characters return to being normal best friends forever and all is well. Yawn. The End. Time to move onto the next anime that will most likely erase all memory of this one from my mind.