Review of ReLIFE

Story: 4 / 10 Yoake approaches a part-time worker Arata and asks him if he wants to re-do a year of his high school life. There's a lot of things that could be done with this premise, but nothing is done and instead the show opts for a typical slice of life melodrama with some romance I suppose. The dialogue is awkward even for an anime, the drama itself is rather stupid and at least to me is not entertaining. It's a thing I've seen in other anime where the drama is caused by a partial or complete lack of communication, one other example of thisbeing Citrus. This is the most annoying type of drama because it is simply solved if the characters were to stop for a minute and have a decent conversation with each other, but if they did that, we wouldn't have an anime. It's weakly constructed drama that falls apart very easily if the characters were to take basic actions and for that reason, it's not entertaining to watch.

Characters: 3 / 10

Again, there's nothing spectacular going on here. You have a romantically dense guy who is happy the majority of the time and unaware of one of how one of the females who is his friend, who is aggressive and causes most of the drama in the show btw, is attracted to him. Apart from those two, the main character, despite going to college and grad school, can't pass some high-school level tests and is thus in the dumbass role, the main female character is emotionally dead for the most part and struggles to understand what her classmates are saying and has a hard time communicating with them (sounds like a real-life mental illness), and every other character is just a tag-along that gets serious when they need to and is otherwise just there for comedic relief occasionally. Tamarai and her two guys are so irrelevant it's not even funny.

All of these characters are so cliche. It makes watching them rather annoying at times, and the comedy style gets boring after a while. The main character is secretly 27 and as such, sometimes, he gives platitudes appropriate to the situation, but they're the most bland messages ever. Things like "Don't give up," and then they're followed up by a flashback of an experience in his life.

Art & Sound: 4 / 10

Nothing special. In fact, the animation is bland and the OST is not memorable at all. I barely even noticed the music that was playing most of the time.

Overall: 4 / 10

The anime is just lackluster. The main character is essentially given in a pill form a life changing experience and the writers opt to have this man go through a slice of life high school experience and occasionally reference the fact that he's 27. Other than that, he's nothing more than the involved, bland high school anime protagonist that you'll see in a lot of other high school dramas. I felt like I wasted my time watching this anime and if I were you, I'd watch the first two episodes to see if the comedy is up your alley, and if it's even remotely boring, skip the anime altogether. Hell, you don't even need to watch the second episode, just watch the first.