Title: Acchi Kocchi
Genre: Comedy, Romance, Slice of Life
Rating: 4.8/10
Summary: The serious-minded Tsumiki and the pure-hearted Io feel they never want to be parted, and yet they haven't fallen in love yet. More than friends but not lovers, they develop an awkward quasi-romance.
Review: This is going to be a fairly short review because there isn’t much to say about these comedy anime. I know it says that it is a romance but I’ll explain in a bit why I don’t consider it to be romance or why I think that it deserves a second season or even specials. I can’t say that I absolutely hated the anime because it didn’t make me angry, more disappointed. You can probably tell from the score but I don’t consider this an anime worth picking up if you want to jump to another review, or continue reading if you want to find out why I’m such a scrooge hating on love.
Probably the best thing about
Acchi Kocchi was the art style. It was simple and sweet while still maintaining an interesting look. The heroine’s hair of course being the most exciting to look at. While everyone else was doomed to have normal looking hair ranging from the typical strawberry to dark brown, Miniwa had a kind of… space look. I can only describe as if you were looking into the night sky. It was multiple shades of blue and flowed in an oddly perfect way, except for her little swoosh antenna of course. The anime had a typical comedic style that allowed for sudden falling movements and hilarious facial expressions. Consistently changing backdrops and rather detailed scenery though makes it stand out from the rest. It kept things fun and interesting but also pushed the anime more towards artistic humor than witty dialogue. This was one of the reasons I didn’t find the anime to be quite up to par with keeping my interests. The other was the forced romance between the main characters.
I don’t mind having a romance that geared more towards comedy because I feel it can work in many ways. I can’t give a great example off the top of my head unfortunately (that might say something), but I wouldn’t count it out of the books.
Acchi Kocchi on the other hand didn’t quite do it the way I see appropriate. It’s great that they tried to keep the anime light hearted with basically no drama so people didn’t get the typical drama-queen fiasco, but it also takes away from the characters. The little rant I have about this anime is the fact it tried to do the reverse of what most romcoms do. Many romance comedies work because they have support characters or bits of comedy sprinkled through the series to prevent it from becoming too heavy. It worked rather well for many anime such as
Toradora,
Lovely Complex,
Nazo no Kanojo X, etc. This series decided to be comedic and sprinkle bits of romance. After watching
Acchi Kocchi I liked to think of the romance as being salt. A little bit of salt was good, and it was sweet at first. However, they seemed to be a bit too much and at some point couldn’t make up their mind between the actual food or a salt lick. If this metaphor didn’t make sense whatsoever let me sum it up: they tried too hard with the romance and it failed. The biggest problem was the lack of character development which I consider to be the essential ingredient in romance (you can probably tell I’m quite hungry with all the food metaphors). I didn’t care if the characters got together, I didn’t care if they made progress, and I certainly didn’t care if one of them rejected the other. Moving back to the comedic aspect of the series, it did give me a few laughs here and there so that’s why I don’t consider it a complete flop. However, it soon began to lose my interest and I would hold off watching it until I got a good four or five episodes behind then just marathoned it. I would half pay attention while working on other things glancing back and forth between two monitors. Some of you may say “Well then you didn’t give it your full attention you probably missed a lot!”. True, I might have missed some jokes here and there, but doesn’t it say something about a comedy if it can’t even keep your attention in the first place?
I found it kind of neat that the main characters sung the opening Acchi de Kocchi de and that they took the time to make their own. However, it wasn’t something I listened to over and over. I listened to it once for the sake of listening then skipped it every time after that. the background music as well wasn’t that great because it lacked variety. There were a few songs, but they were all basically the same that it was hard to distinguish between them. They were all simple beats and melodies that I could someone relaxing to. Other than that though the soundtrack is nothing to take note of.
Final statements: It’s an
avoid watch because the comedy didn’t keep my attention and the romance was a bust. If you can’t give me one “D’aww…” moment then why even bother?
