Review of Kokoro Connect

I am also including the 4 episode "sequel" in this review. I have been meaning to watch Kokoro Connect for a little while now, actually it's been on my to watch list for years. I decided to revisit this short and sweet anime about the daily lives of a few high school misfits, whom I related to more so than I could care to admit, with a few twists along the way. High school animes usually diverge into two directions: the cop-out, fan service, sort of vibe, where the characters remain static and one can sit back and enjoy the nothingness and fill the voidof your empty soul with cute girls doing cute things. Or the anime can twist the formula and make it something completely unique and different. Kokoro does the latter.

But what many anime do is fail to fully flesh out the characters, especially if the show is not more than 24 episodes, as we see here. It's hard to make you, as an outside observer, want to know and care what happens to the characters in such a short amount of time. Kokoro connect takes the traditional anime tropes of character development and actually delves into the lives of the characters, and the secrets they harbor.

We all know the masks we put on for others is a fake one. You have a mask for your friends, a mask for your family, a mask for your classmates, for your coworkers, the list goes on. We switch our masks and it becomes exhausting, not quite knowing who we really are inside. On the surface interactions are pleasant, but inside we dance with our inner turmoil. So what do we have here? Turns out each character is suddenly thrust into a strange situation, wherein each learns of the other's darkest secrets.

Of course, it has its flaws. There I think is one too many characters for each character to have a fully fleshed out role, the art is nice but a bit bland, the music is mostly unnoticeable and some of their problems are solved too easily. But overall, it was a solid watch and worth at least a cursory playthrough.

I'm trying not to give away too many spoilers and leave it general, as I haven't reviewed an anime in years, but Kokoro connect deserves at least an 8 in my book. It is a clever, emotional, slice of life anime that concludes in a satisfactorily way. Perhaps one day my own mask shall fall...