Review of School Rumble: 2nd Semester

It has been a while since I saw the first season of School rumble. I don't remember much of it, except it was a lot of fun. So I had to check this one out too. Overall, it is a shallow but very fun comedy. Animation Actually, there are very few animes with an animation style I don't like. SR2 looks as good as most "school life" animes out there, nothing spectacular but the characters are very well designed and there are lots of awesome scenes (often dream sequences or surreal shots to show off an emotion) that mostly fit in. Sound I was quite surprised to notice that thereare no extremely annoying voice acting in this series. There are almost always at least one character (often female) that I find very irritating due to her voice. But not here (ok, Lala balances on the border).

The intro song is nice, but no top-ten material. I mostly skipped the ending songs, I found them boring. The background music fits the crazy theme, but some tunes get repetetive after a few dozen plays.

Story
Ok, X loves Y, Y loves Z, Z loves W who loves Y, yadda yadda. The whole series is all about love triangles, which of course opens up for lots of hilarious moments. Sadly, these hilarious moments get too many and get in the way for a decent story/character development.

Since no one ever ever dare to confess their feelings to their loved one, everything rolls on and on in the same way the whole series. A few confessions and breakups would have kept the series more interesting.

All this said, there are still lots and lots of humour and funny moments, and that is obviously what School rumble is about.

Character
Most of the characters are likeable, and there are a lot of them! Many of the secondary characters were a bit hard to tell apart, though. I suppose I should have watched the 1st season directly before this one.

Character development is almost non-existant. Towards the end you get to know the Tsukamoto sisters a bit better, but overall the characters are very flat. This is not entirelly bad, though, since their personalities often are interesting enough to keep you focussed for a while, but towars the end of the season it feels a bit monotonous.

Value
I'll probably watch this one together with the 1st season again in a couple of years, just to re-experience the hilarious atmosphere.