Anime: Princess Lover!

What a hidden gem. Princess Lover is one of the rare cases where a bishoujo game adaptation doesn't fall prey to simple character archetypes or messy plotlines.

Animation:

Princess Lover features a style very similar to Shugo Chara and Seitokai Yakuindomo. With clean lines and crisp animation, this anime is a treat to watch. Characters are very lively, and every scene there is something moving other than a flappy mouth. Chibi art is used sparingly and to good effect, while key frames are utilized very liberally to give the anime a very stylistic look. For example, in episode 1 Charlotte's facial expressions and body movements after being saved by Teppei was very fluid and gave a lot of charm to her character. The fights between Sylvi and Teppei are also wonderfully animated, stabbing and slashing very well done.

Sound:

Music is used sparingly, but are nice. Opening is a pretty forgettable song, but the ending by Yozuca is quite catchy. Seiyuus did a great job here, especially Charlotte. An honorable mention goes to Norio Wakamoto for voicing the bad ass granddad, aka the head of the Arima Financial Group.

Story:

Not much of a central story except for the anime exclusive final arc that runs from episode 7-12. Each episode ends with a well executed cliffhanger, and although some plot points are pretty unbelievable (Teppei's pretty much invincible) the characters are pretty well defined between protagonists and antagonists. One of the best things the screenplay writer did was to create the "Hot Springs Pact" between the 4 main females, which gets rid of all the random bullshit that comes with misunderstandings in other harem anime.

Character

Here is the true charm of Princess Lover. There are 4 main girls and each are developed quite well, especially if you watch the DVD specials afterwards. The main girl (Charlotte) gets mad props for acting the naive princess very well, and is a good foil to the main character. Sylvi and Yuu play good supporting roles and also get solid development and background. Seika's own episode featured awesome fashion show animation and also a nicely wrapped up plot point about her past with the main character.

Value and Enjoyment

I whole heatedly recommend Princes Lover to anyone who is a fan of the harem or bishoujo game genre. The easy on the eyes animation, crisp character designs, and a easy to follow whimsical plot make this anime very enjoyable. The characters also don't act to set archetypes and isn't afraid to step outside of their predefined boundaries. There is also an ample amount of fanservice, along with the female characters actually ADMITTING THEIR FEELINGS and KISSING THE MAIN CHARACTER. How revolutionary!

The Hot Springs Pact alone made this one of the best anime of 2009.

Princess Lover is the best bishoujo game anime of 2009.

Harem lovers unite, fan service and ecchi galore.

Animation 7/10
Not bad but not great. Some may consider it sub par in today's standards, but I was not bothered by it.
Sound 6/10
Voice actors matched the characters. The usual j-pop intro and ending.
Story 7/10
Murder, revenge, and love are just a few motif's in this harem.
Character Development 6/10
Though only 13 episodes it does exist. From humble beginnings to becoming an heir. Certain qualities are maintained(ecchiness) while others are expanded.
Value 6/10
This is definitely worth your time if you're a fan of this genre, if not then... why would you be reading about this anime if you don't like the genre?
Enjoyment 8/10
It had its moments. A bit of comedy, fan service, and plot development. Good balance.

Princess Lover! -- The Charles II of Spain of harem animes.

For those of you who know history, that title should probably tell you all you need to know. Princess Lover! is a 2009 dating-sim-based harem anime concerning Teppei Arima, a completely normal japanese high school boy whose parents die in a tragic and non-specific accident off-screen in the first five minutes of the first episode. Like with all anime protagonists, being parent-less immediately tosses him into a world of freedom and adventure as he is left to be taken care of by his incredibly ultra-rich grandfather who he's had had no contact with prior, and attracts a harem of rich, lonely, single girls his age (and a maid) who all have huge... Tracts of land (and naturally, the one with the largest is blatantly the winner from five minutes in). Princess Lover! looks more or less like a conglomerate of bad harem anime clichés, and with that in mind I went into this anime expecting nothing but mediocrity. And while the show indeed gave me that for the first four episodes, Princess Lover! eventually managed to actually let me down, even on those meagre expectations.

Princess Lover! isn't merely utterly predictable, immature, and based almost entirely on harem anime archetypes and clichéd situations meant to wring out as much half-baked fanservice as they can from the gormless protagonist and his badly justified posse of improbably love-starved hanger-ons: The whole ordeal eventually goes beyond the call of duty and summons forth the demons of shonen fighting anime clichés and plot contrivances to the field as well. Which, when combined with a staggering ignorance of politics, economy and sociology (not to mention the laws of physics, or biology, in general), and a cast that feels like they've been clubbed about the head as children, makes for an extremely poor showing. And, as the cardinal sin, the show also tries to make the story dramatic while at the very same time passing off most of the above infractions as comedy; failing miserably at both because the drama isn't the least bit dramatic and the humour just isn't funny. And also-

Get on with it!

*Ack*. All right, all right, all right. Just... Don't say that word any more.

Animation and Graphics: 3/10 -- It's only a model (sssh!).

Princess Lover! has a fairly underwhelming graphical impression. Most of the character models, both male and female, appear based on the exact same facial and body-build template. This is pervasive to the degree that most of the characters are only a haircut, a bit of hair dye and a pair of contact lenses away from looking exactly like each other... Well, ok, and either some *very* invasive surgery or a pair of balloons stuffed down one's shirt for the sex change. The characters' body language is very lacking, and most of their screen-time is spent in conversations only showing small parts of their bodies (usually with the camera focused on the panties/breast area of the closest female) and only the mouth moving. The backgrounds are similarly simplistic: Although some of them are painted with some degree of skill, even the best of them tend to be static, repetitive, and simply consist of a lot of similar motifs repeatedly pasted into the background. The finest part of the show, visually speaking, is the pan-over of the ludicrously improbable school the main characters attend. Many of the rest just look like the same building looked at from different viewpoints, even when they're intended to be different buildings, and the interior shots and background characters are criminally low in detail.

To add to this is, of course, the fanservice. With the advent of Queen's Blade, there seems to be a disturbing trend in low-quality works like these in trying to push the envelope (or at least emulate Queen's Blade) in putting semi-porn and over-the-top fanservice into the show, and Princess Lover! is one of these. As usual, this base pandering annoys me, especially when the focus on fanservice a) makes no sense, and b) detracts from attempts at actually improving the show. The fact that it's *censored* porn doesn't even help; I'm only given the impression that they're trying to get you to buy the DVD just so you can pay to get the same insult to storytelling twice, but this time with a nipple here and there.

Audio: 4/10 -- Not even Norio Wakamoto can save this anime. Could probably have done with a bit more outrrrrageous accents.

I have very little to say about Princess Lover!'s audio. The music is nigh non-existent and instantly forgettable, while the OP and ED are both completely skippable. The voice acting does not impress either. With the exception of the curiosity of hearing Norio Wakamoto playing a kindly old grandfather instead of his usual overly bombastic villain roles (a role I must say he handles fairly well, actually), none of the cast really impress, and knowing how some of voice cast is capable of vastly better than this (like throwing Yuki Matsuoka, aka Osaka from Azumanga Daioh, into the forgettable maid role) makes me sad. Their time would probably be better spent going around saying "Ni!" at old ladies than getting roles in this thing.

Story: 2/10 -- The concept of migrating coconuts is starting to sound more and more sensible after five minutes with *this* story...

Princess Lover!, as I touched upon, concerns the harem of recently-ennobled Teppei Arima who's had to move away from his normal life and into that of his grandfather after his parents end up being shipped away on the proverbial cart. Arima spends most of the first half of the show with the usual 'male harem lead problem' of the various members of his harem fighting over his affections (while the case is at the same time blatantly clear that he's already fallen for Charlotte), while he at the same time has to organize a party to get accepted into his ludicrous school's equally ludicrous Social Club so he can... Er... Make friends or something? Despite his already instantly-forming harem? Is he that bad at fitting in? Frankly, the whole thing is the sort of tale of woe that would make me break out the World's Smallest Violin, not helped along by the extremely low proficiency of the storycraft and pacing. The good parts of the anime, in other words. This all comes to its 'climax' in the middle episode: Basically a complete rip-off of episode 8 of Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu if we add the fact that the ending includes an official 'cementing' of the show's harem, in which all the girls state their intention to pursue the main character.

From the very next episode on all of this is essentially dropped so the show can go over entirely to a form of rescue romance directed towards Charlotte. Basically, Princess Lover! uses half the season to set up a plot that is then immediately dropped, in the very next episode, for a shift in direction. From that point on, the harem comedy part is replaced with what I'd call a success-less intermingling of attempted parody with equally laxly attempted drama, the end effects of which is that the middle episode ends up becoming a shameless rip-off separating two wildly different stories from each other and sticks out like some sort of freakish intermission screen with a horrid synthesizer soundtrack in the middle of a dramatic bridge-crossing scene. Said rescue part is where the true deficiencies of Princess Lover!'s 'plot', and I'm not even entirely sure about the 'plot' part, starts to shine through. Plot 'twists' that are generally either utterly foreseeable, or so contrived that no sanity, logic or reason could predict them, start to get used. Outright holes in the plot start showing their ugly mugs, and quite a lot of elements used to advance the story, such as why the heir to an industry group is somehow permitted to attack a building held by armed terrorists armed only with a bokken, or how the "#¤& a DNA virus can somehow infect a computer, or the idiotic friendship speeches lifted straight out of shows like Yu-Gi-Oh! stretched my suspension of disbelief to a point well beyond snapping. Let's not go into the insulting treatment the show even gives to European politics, demographics and, well, everything (last time I checked, you don't join the Royal Guard of a country by beating up a member), or the pathetic ending.

One thing that does cross my mind is that, on some level, Princess Lover! may be invoking these ridiculous plot elements as a type of comedy or satire. If that is indeed the case, Princess Lover! is far subtler as satire than my experience in visual media is able to sense: The ridiculous plot points seem to be played entirely straight from where I stand, and what comedy is mixed up just falls flat at best and is annoying at worst.

Characters: 2/10 -- *You're* the princess? Well, I didn't vote for you!

And then, we have the characters. Built almost entirely from archetypes, the cast includes your 'standard harem lead male', the 'innocent yet overly flirtatious towards main character' winning girl princess, the 'passive-aggressive warrior woman with an obvious crush' princess, the tsundere, and the 'submissive maid', none of whom I'll even bother to name. Frankly, none of them impressed me much as characters: They seem so insistent on acting after their archetypes that I never get a feeling of neither realism nor character exploration/development from them. I don't even get a feel of them being 'characters' at this stage, as I've already seen all I needed to see, and done better, from characters who use these archetypes as a smaller part of their overall existence, in dozens of other series. What's worse, Princess Lover!'s cast presented without so much as a nod to how stereotypical they are, or with an attempt to put a variant or spin on them. They're all played utterly strait, which makes their behaviour even less tolerable. Put simply, at best I would consider their performances 'eccentric', and at worst I wanted death to await most of them with nasty big pointy teeth.

The side characters are equally flat and built on harem/high school comedy stereotypes: We have the annoying (and possibly gay) classmate, the girl posse and the utterly sad (as in badly done) villains, whose 'evil plan' defies description in how utterly stupid said plan is.

The less said, the better, actually: This show's character gallery is plain awful; they're so bad I don't even feel like taunting them; they're not worth the bloody effort. Looking at these royals give me a new-found appreciation for the French Revolution.

Value: 2/10 -- Utterly, completely, without merit. And the creator smelt of elderberries.

Princess Lover! spends the first half being lacking in value due to a dependence on clichés and archetypes and a generally unremarkable character gallery and meaningless, trite story. The second half, meanwhile, I caught myself actively trying to not remember. While one might say that the direction taken was an attempt at doing something new, the only thing really 'new' about this sort of archetypical rescue romance is that I've never seen a harem anime try using this sort of scenario (or at least not to this degree) before. The bad handling only makes me hope that there will be a long period before someone else tries.

I find that I cannot in good faith recommend Princess Lover! to anyone; this thing even makes things like To-Love-Ru look good by comparison. I don't even know what to recommend instead; pretty much *anything* short of School Days and Kurozuka will do the trick. And as for re-watching... I'd rather cut down the mightiest tree in the forest. With a herring.

Enjoyment: 2/10 -- ...I've had worse.

But not that many, come to that. Put shortly, Princess Lover! was hardly what I'd call enjoyable. At best in the first three to four episodes, the show could be described as 'almost something resembling charming', before going on to fall to the depths of depravity that took place around the initiation of the Charlotte rescue arc. When the bad logic, plot holes, badly written characters and the, bluntly, retarded handling of class dynamics and European politics became plot points holes, this anime actually started to physically pain me. Making myself finish the thing was practically a herculean effort, worthy of the finest and the bravest knights of Camelot, and in practice I was spurred only by my desire to venomously savage this animated demi-abomination with a well-deserved whine rant.

While I could tolerate *some* of it (AAAAH, I said the word!), I'd say the anime at a whole is best enjoyed by turning off your screen, muting your speakers, putting some good classical music in your media/CD player, and read a good book.

And for those of you who wondered up to now; yes, I put those Holy Grail quotes in to provide myself *some* amusement about the whole process during the review part. Which brings me to tonight's final word on Princess Lover!:

Total: 2.5/10 -- "Ah, now we see the idiocy inherent in the system! Come and see the idiocy inherent in the system! Help, help, my intellect's being repressed!"

"Bloody critic!"