The design principle is a little bit strange in one respect (which I'll come back to in a bit), as the characters are nicely envisioned, but are also as generic as they come (much like a lot of things in this anime). Granted there are a few exceptions to the rule, but in general there's not much difference between the various depictions on offer. The high school setting, town and surrounding environs are nicely designed and detailed, but when it comes to rom-com anime, once you've seen one high school, you've pretty much seen them all. It's pretty obvious from the artwork that there is a large degree of genericism inherent in this anime, and Amagami does nothing to break away from the stereotypes.
Still, if one simply treats them as a series of short stories then they can be entertaining, but the plot for each is nothing special, and the formulaic approach to each tale is, at times, a bit too familiar, and offers very little in the way of innovation, and rather a lot in the way of predictability. To further compound this, certain characters seem to be clueless about the circumstances around people they've known for years. The problem is that this assumption ignores the portrayals of the characters in the previous stories, effectively making them little more than blank canvasses. Now these could be explained away by assuming that people act one way with one person, and another way with someone else, and so on, and one could easily view Amagami in this light. What emerges are a series of contradictory actions and behaviours that don't really seem to make sense. Then again, the majority of development points where both the plot and the characters are concerned have really been done to death in anime and manga, so it's no surprise that there's at least a half decent story in there.Īfter all, if you give enough monkeys enough time they can apparently produce Shakespeare (although it does make one wonder where they keep him).Įach individual tale is pretty decent in its own right, but when one considers them as part of the whole a different picture begins to appear. The biggest problem with short stories is that there needs to be enough content and context within the plot to justify the actions, thoughts and emotions of the characters, and it's surprising that Amagami manages to offer some semblance of a storyline over the course of each tale. The plot follows the game's methodology by offering up multiple heroines for the protagonist to pursue, and while some may find this a refreshing approach, it's not really original as the series attempts to mask its shortcomings by adopting different narrative styles from one tale to the next. Now on the surface Amagami SS looks like the common or garden harem romantic comedy (but with the harem aspect applied in a different way). Along the way various relationship shenanigans ensue which cause the usual misunderstandings, reconciliations, attractions, repulsions, etc, etc. The series is split up into six short stories (and one "special" episode), that recount Tachibana Junichi's quest for high school love, and how he finds it with six different girls (and before you ask, no, this isn't School Days all over again). Unlike its predecessor though, Amagami SS decides to take a different approach with the storyline, and breaks things up into bite-sized relationship pieces that supposedly makes them easier to swallow, which works. Kimikiss, it's only natural that Enterbrain would attempt to emulate the relative success of the latter game and its anime adaptation. When it comes to visual media though, such sentiments seem to go out of the window, across the fields, and off into the wild blue yonder, especially where adaptations are concerned.Ī number of people may already be familiar with the fact that the series is yet another adaptation of a dating sim, and given that this is the spiritual successor to It's a fairly trite adage, but like most old sayings there's an element of truth to it. If you don't know where you're from, then you don't know where you are, and you don't know where you're going.