Review of ReLIFE

If you had a chance to relive your youth, would you take it? The story follows Kaizaki Arata, an unemployed 27-years-old man who is given that chance. After accepting it and taking a pill his body is now that of a 17-years-old adolescent and he must attend highschool again for a year. This anime is kind of a "deconstruction" of teenage social relationships, mixing that with SOL and a bit of romance-comedy, with the addition that in the cast of youthful adolescents full of energy and love to give there is a grown up dude in the body of a teenager who sometimes acts like thevoice of experience, trying to relive his youth at his fullest and making his new friends enjoy their youth while they still can, though not making their lives simpler.

Somehow I feel that this anime falls into the same category of Kokoro Connect. ReLIFE explores those relationships from the point of view of a 27-years-old man. The basis for the plot of ReLIFE (the pill and stuff) are rather incredible (as seen in Detective Conan) but it never affects the unraveling of the story. It has its tedious moments of slowness and repetitiveness that I feel are important to get more in touch with the characters, but overall it's fairly good.

Characters are rather cliché (but honestly where do you see characters in a school based SOL that aren't cliché), you have the silent girl, the tomboyish-girl, the laid-back boy, et cetera. Character development is really slow at the start of the series in my opinion and feels very rushed when it actually happens. At some point the development is stationary (the tedious part I mentioned earlier), when the series focuses on the past of some characters. There are little to no interventions of background characters or even side characters that are important for like a half of an episode though. In any case, again, this doesn't affect the unraveling of the plot towards the ending.

The design of the characters is very solid, they never lose their shape nor feel off while out of focus. Somehow the drawing and their reactions feel exaggerated like those of an anime of the past decade (you know, very "anime-ish") and I personally feel that it's pretty nice (sometimes I miss them watching new shows). The backgrounds aren't tough but simple, and visually the series is very pleasant to watch. Voice acting has nothing much remarkable in my opinion, as it's well done but in some few moments the tone of the voice feels uncompatible with the expressions of the character. Talking about the soundtrack I really liked those eccentric piano passages that are played in tension moments, and the rest of the soundtrack fits the atmosphere of a SOL but is not memorable at all, mostly because the whole soundtrack is rather absent for the majority of the series.

In any case this is a fun and pleasant series to watch, besides everything I really enjoyed the series. The jokes are ok, the drama is nice and the plot is easy to follow along. I highly recommend it if you like SOL with a bit of insight in social relationships.

I would like to have watched this series when I was in high school.

Quantifying:
STORY: 7/10
Art: 8/10
Sound: 6/10
Character: 6/10
Enjoyment: 9/10
OVERALL: 8/10

Thank you for reading.