Review of Kokoro Connect

The story in itself was very interesting in the beginning. The premise of switching bodies and someone controlling all of this as if it was an experiment (not a spoiler, stated in the first episode) is extremely interesting! And for a while, it was! However, as the series kept going on, there were just more problems to be found. I'm going to start with the small things. Like the blatant homophobia with Fujishima's character. A lesbian (?) who comes on to one of the girls and is seemingly only interested in sex. In the later episodes, she's more helpful than creepy, but the first time wesee her is when she's coming on too strong to one of the girls, which I will always have a problem with.

I don't know if it was the translation that I watched, or that's literally what they said in Japanese, but there were many moments where people said: "cure your trauma" as if trauma can be "cured" with one conversation. It was incredibly disrespectful and not at all true. Although, that could be a translation issue and they actually said something different in those moments.

I also found a problem in the love story. They are first years in high school and the fact that they are saying "I love you" is insane to me. Like, calm down, you're kids. But that might be more of a personal problem. Slight spoiler now: I wish Taichi expressed more of an interest in Inaba more than just a couple of comments here and there.

Now to the story, which will probably have spoilers, but I need to get this off my chest.

Although having different situations, there was one basic problem with almost every member and they fixed it in the exact same way.

"I'm scared to show my true emotions with these people."

and each and every one is fixed by them finding out that they're friends and can count on each other.

This isn't necessarily bad, but when it's done over, and over again, with the exact same group of characters, it just gets boring and frustrating.

So the first few times it was interesting. I liked Yui's plot a lot, and Inaba's. While Iori's plot started out strong, by the OAS, I didn't understand her character. And yet again it had the same resolution. 'I can trust my friends to like me for who I am, regardless if it's different than what they thought.'

And Iori's conflict didn't really make sense in the end. Why was Taichi wanting her to be different, even though they already had this conversation? Why did Iori push them away, even though she already knew she could count on them? Why did she say that they 'didn't understand' yet never tried to explain it to them?

And Yui, poor Yui, where in the final episodes, the writers belittled your trauma and made you think it wasn't healthy to rely on people. As if what you went through shouldn't have made a difference in your karate career.

I understand what the writers were going for, how she needs to stand up for herself, but they did it very, very wrong. The dialogue was not correct for what they intended.

Short note for Aoki, who was the most static character in the series. You deserved more than being a devoted love interest who had a half an episode of character development.

In the end, I was frustrated with each character and bored. Also, the things that happened in the last episode didn't make any sense at all. Apparently high school boys don't understand how to solve problems.

tl;dr The story started out strong, it hit a couple of snags on the way, then hit a thousand more in the OAS.