Review of Nisekoi: False Love

Alright, I guess this is going to be my first review on this site. I should start by saying this isn't just a review of this season of Nisekoi, it's also a review of it's second season "Nisekoi:", so look at this as a review of the anime adaptation as a whole. I only thought it would be fair seeing as if you're anything like me, you're probably going to naturally move on to the second season if you liked the first. I should also make it clear I have not read any of the manga as of now so I can’t judge it’s qualitynor compare it to the anime. With that out of the way, I'll try my best to get my thoughts across without saying too much in regards to spoilers.

If you don't want to risk even minor spoilers then here's the TL;DR version: I suggest if this series catches your interest that you just start and finish with the manga, then move onto the anime if it still interests you even after. If you're deadset on watching the anime first, then I suggest you watch only the first season and then move onto the manga afterwards. With all of that out of the way, time to move on to the main review. This is going to be pretty lengthy so bear with me.

The show mainly revolves around Raku Ichijou’s quest to confess to Kosaki Onodera and find the girl he made his promise of marriage to 10 years ago, while also learning to deal with his situation with Chitoge Kirisaki. The plot is undoubtedly contrived and overly complicated for what’s otherwise a pretty run-of-the-mill romcom, but that said, it started feeling pretty natural to me after a couple episodes, so I don't mind it much.

As for the characters, I actually liked them all quite a bit! Even the ones I didn't like at first I eventually warmed up to. The cast is probably one of the strongest points of the series if you ask me. While none of them are super deeply written or anything, all of them manage to be enjoyable and have pretty good chemistry with each other, which allows there to be very few outright dull moments. Onodera quickly became my favorite character of the bunch. She has a lot of sweet and heartfelt moments, as well as entertaining moments that stem from her extreme shyness.

The presentation (meaning the animation, soundtrack, and voice acting, etc) is phenomenal. Shaft is the studio behind one of my favorite anime series, Monogatari, so I had high expectations for the presentation here as well and they did not disappoint. While visually there’s nothing particularly unique about it’s style, it’s all very pleasing to look at, with plenty vibrant colors and lively animation. The voices for each character feel extremely fitting, and I found the background music throughout quite catchy too.

As for the opening and ending themes... wow, these are fantastic. I admittedly don’t find anything all that special about some of the intro themes, but some of them are catchier than others for sure. In my opinion though, the EDs are where it really shines. All of them are sung by one or more of the female characters in the cast, and not only do these songs seamlessly blend with the personalities of those singing them, I found even the weaker ED songs really great. Recover Decoration has been stuck in my head all day as I’m writing this.

Now lets talk about season 1 in specific. Season 1's pacing isn’t great, but by the end of the season I felt the main three all grew a noticeable amount. The mystery surrounding what happened 10 years ago isn’t close to being solved or anything, but it feels like you know a lot more about the situation by the end of the season. What I’m getting at here is that even though season 1 didn’t exactly end on some sort of great closer, it did feel like a worthwhile experience by it’s end.

I’ve seen others saying they felt as if the plot stalled too much which I do think is a valid complaint, but I’ve always enjoyed slice of life stuff a lot so I didn’t mind there being a lot of moments unrelated to the overarching plot. I think it lets us see the cast in a more casual setting which I think is a good window into their personalities. If you’re going to try and carry a more intricately woven narrative such as with Nisekoi though, you should obviously dedicate a large amount of your time to having scenes covering said plotline as well. Season 1 did make these sorts of plot developments scarcer than they should’ve been, but again, despite all of this it still managed to feel like a worthwhile experience, to me at least. So overall, despite it’s flaws, I really enjoyed season 1 and was really excited to move onto season 2. In hindsight, too excited.

As for “Nisekoi:”, the second season... oh boy, do I have a lot to say about this one. I'll admit a good amount of the fault here is on me for having high expectations coming straight from the first season, but this season definitely deserves some scrutiny.

So let's start by answering a simple question; what exactly is different about the second season compared to the first? You may be surprised to know that actually not much has changed. The characters are all still enjoyable, the presentation is still just as good, and there are even a couple episodes I think are really good in this season. However, there is one major flaw with this season that absolutely hurts the experience by a noticeable degree; the lack of development in the overarching plot.

Now like I said, the plot development in the first season wasn't great either, but it still felt as if the story had progressed a good amount throughout it's run, even if the progress could have been better. The second season throws this completely out the window and gives us next to no plot development at all. Aside from a few minor details about the event from 10 years ago surfacing, there is almost no plot development at all. For a 12 episode season, that is absurd. Granted, that’s 8 episodes shorter than the first season, but they still had more than enough time to develop the plot further.

They instead decide to spend their time introducing new characters (who aren’t bad, but get barely any development) and episodes that just feel like outright filler. The worst part about this is that at several points (specifically a few minutes into the first episode and at the very end of the fourth) they dangle plot threads relating to the overarching story right in front of the viewer as if to say “we’ll address these this season” and then are never addressed again. We do get some interesting subplots this season that have little to do with the main plot, but they ultimately feel kinda pointless since the season just abruptly ends.

And that’s another thing; the season’s end. The end of the second season legitimately just feels like a normal episode. The only difference is that it’s one of the heavier episodes of the season, but even then there were much more heavy episodes in the first season.

Many of the animes I liked the first season of only got better in it’s later seasons, so I couldn’t help but feel like the second season of Nisekoi would be just as good if not better than the first. Up until the very last episode of the season, I was thinking “well surely they’re going to address a few plot points soon, right?”

It’s hard to properly describe how I felt when I finished the second season. It almost felt like I was betrayed in a way, like I just willingly gave this anime my time and it lead me along into thinking it’d be worth it, but it wasn’t. It felt like a complete waste of not only the time I spent watching the second season, but the time and emotional investment spent on the first season as well. I felt extremely burnt to say the least. A few hours after I finished watching the season, in a fit of frustration, I looked up the ending to the manga just so I could have some sort of proper conclusion in mind. In hindsight this wasn’t the greatest idea since that killed the main motivator for reading the manga, but what's done is done. I still might read it regardless at some point though.

Anyways, my point here is that the viewer is likely to be lead to believe season 2 will have some amount of building on the plot, only to have almost none. I don’t know if this is the fault of the pacing in the manga which the anime may have followed too closely, or if they felt certain there would be a third season after this, but either way I don’t think that excuses how almost every plot thread is left unaccounted for with next to no plot progression.

This review has already gone on for way longer than I was hoping it’d be so let me just finish this up here. In short, I think one would probably have more enjoyment out of the series if they just read through the manga. I can’t say for certain, but I have to imagine it tells it’s story more properly. I was really disappointed by the ending of the second season and I wanted to warn people looking to get into the series like I was. The anime is far from bad, but the second season put a really bad taste in my mouth and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Anyways, I hope this review was helpful. Thanks for reading.