Review of Kokoro Connect

Kokoro Connect was disappointing, considering the premise and the first episode. The dust jacket description is that a group of five friends start suffering from personality switches and other strange phenomena, and they have to figure out how to deal with it together. The first episode includes gender swaps, boys discovering what it feels like to be a woman (thanks, Madonna), romantic hangups, and other good stuff like this. "Exciting!" you think. "If the first episode starts like this, what manner of shenanigans are they going to get up to in the rest of the series?" Unfortunately, it's all downhill from there. Within the first coupleepisodes, we find that the personality swaps are the result of a bored, supernatural entity trying to create interesting situations. Our heroes, displeased by the intrusion, respond by trying to be less interesting to this entity, for example, by trying to avoid the public when inhabiting one of their fellows' bodies. Their defenses work, and the entity is required to throw them into more and more drastic situations to get its fix.

The way the characters respond to their plight is surprising to me, as someone with a mild interest in filmmaking and storytelling. It's rational, but it's not interesting. Who wants to watch characters *try* to be boring? I would have expected this plot device to be used to facilitate interesting interactions between the characters. It doesn't make for very interesting television.

Another disappointment is that the characters utterly fail to get down to any of the shenanigans suggested by the first episode. Considering someone basically gets to second base in the first episode, with someone else's body, no less, one would have hoped to see some more interesting stuff going on. I get that this is a show aimed at teens, but come on. The extent of what we see through the rest of the series are some exceptionally chaste kisses -- and I mean chaste *for anime*.

But the most egregious problem with the series has to be the character of Nagase Iroi. Without going into too many details, her plight in the last five episodes of the series has to be the biggest example of first world problems I've ever seen in an anime. It got to the point where I couldn't bring myself to listen to her whining any longer and had to fast forward through large chunks of the last few episodes (I'm referring to the Michi Random episodes).

I don't think this was a bad show. But it suffered from some serious technical issues, including how the characters respond to stress and the relatability of the problems they have. I had very high hopes from the first episode, which weren't in any way lived up to by the rest of the series.