Review of ReLIFE

MAL tells me that this is the 200th anime I've seen so I thought I'd share my thoughts! This show has some flaws which kinda bug me, but I can't help really liking it. I think, like a lot of people I can relate a little too much to Arata (although I'm not nearly as charming). I'm 29 and while plenty successful objectively, I have no idea what I'm doing with my life, so watching a show about regaining motivation to live well really appeals to me. So yes, the concept isn't really original and they didn't do anything fancy with it, but what I appreciated mostis how gentle and sincere it was. There was a nice amount of engaging drama without being over the top and it was interesting and enjoyable from start to finish. The writing was pretty good and it totally held my engagement, which is a big deal these days because I'm dropping about 3/4 of the series that I start.

However, as I mentioned above, it did do a few things to annoy me. Firstly, there are way too many fake old people, they make up half the cast of the show, and while I mostly like them, for me it detracts from the fun of the concept. Now, while I like mostly like the characters I have a couple of problems with them. Arata is a little too perfect, and clearly in an effort to combat this they give him the flaw of being bad at schoolwork. This rings annoyingly false, the guy has a degree, he hasn't been out of studying that long, sure he might be a little rusty on some subjects, but you'd expect him to nail at least some of them. This running joke just kinda annoyed me. If they wanted him to have a character flaw to normalise him they could have picked anything else.

Also, Hishino, grrrrrr, the twist at the end (which they made way too obvious early on) was kinda annoying and felt weird at the end of the series. I know it sets up season 2 but, grrrrr. That said I have hope that season 2 can give her a nice arc. Also, her character feels a little tooo much at times and felt a bit erratic.

I really liked the ensemble of kids, they were all a lot of fun, I do wish we had seen a few more of them, or gotten a bit more interaction with the ones we only saw a few times.

All in all it gets a 7.5 (rounded up) for being a gentle enjoyable show.