Review of Love Tyrant

tl;dr: An anime that does well at its lighter comedic aspects due to a number of reasons, but for the very same reasons isn’t able to do well in its more serious aspects. I think the best way to describe this anime is chaos. Things move really fast. Characters are completely ridiculous in terms of personality and actions. And the story is all sorts of wack filled to the brim with really random things. The thing is, that for a good portion of it, this works incredibly well. When the show is just being light hearted amusing randomness, it makes it all the more amusing. I really enjoyed the crazy love polygon, helping random couples, thecrazy penguin, immortality related weirdness, and the ridiculous amount of sudden kissing. Other than Seiji, the main characters are all crazy, but it’s really fun just to watch them be crazy with Seiji as a foil to the craziness. The humor is great and had me literally laughing out loud pretty often. This portion was hilarious, amusing, and greatly enjoyable. But, though this is how it starts, as it goes on this lessens in favor of focusing more and more on more intense and dramatic storytelling with that pretty much completely taking over at the end. However, it doesn’t become less chaotic. While with the more amusing parts you can just kind of turn your brain off and go along with it and have fun, that’s not really possible when you feel you’re supposed to be taking things seriously. The characters being chaotic now feels like them being inconsistent with motivations that aren’t clear, and the plot that arises as a result of this feels incredibly contrived and forced. It being really fast paced now feels rushed, with it feeling like it’s not properly explaining things and being hard to follow at times. It also seems to bring up random plot points related to characters that aren’t fleshed out properly and hence feel pointless. The crazy mechanics such as immortality just don’t seem to work well and the plot where such things should matter seems kind of off as a result. The ending while satisfying enough in general, comes at the peak end of all this, and hence really wasn’t all that enjoyable. Ultimately, the chaos is a double edges sword for this show, in that it was able to properly use it for half of it, but lost control of it and had it greatly bring down the other half.

The art style I really liked, with it being very light. The animation wasn’t amazing but was solid enough for most of it and pretty great when it felt it really mattered. The opening was super cozy in terms and visuals and audio, and thus I thought it was great and fit really well with the parts of the show that were good. The ending was decent. The soundtrack had a few good tracks such as Shikimi’s theme, but overall while decent wasn’t particularly memorable.