Anime: Amagami SS

Amagami SS: Die Klischees hoch! Die Handlung fest erschlossen! SS marschiert, mit ruhig, festem-OUCH!... Point taken. I’ll quit now.

Right, now that I’ve successfully insulted and/or driven off all the Germans, Jews, Romani, Polacks, British, French, Dutch, Russians/other assorted eastern Europeans, Scandinanians (minus the finnish), Greeks, war veterans and anyone with no sense of humour away from this review (categories that would, in fact, include myself), let’s get it over with.

Amagami SS (translated as “Sweet Nibble SS” – don’t ask me what the double lightning association is in there for), which I by the way have already Godwined so don’t go sitting around waiting for me to start later, is a spring 2010 anime animated by AIC and based on a (surprise, surprise) PS2 dating sim by Enterbrain. Just like its predecessor Kimikiss, the anime is a classic dating sim romance anime, its only call to distinction being its structure. Instead of having eight girls all wanting to jump the protagonist’s bones at the same time, the show is structured around arcs that each cover one scenario from the game. This means that each arc is (in theory) focused on one love story and one love story alone, creating a show where there are no ‘winning girl’ or ‘haremettes’. Every girl gets her own chance at getting the ‘hero’s sole attention and fall in love with him without interruptions, and then the next arc kicks off from the starting point again with the universe reset.

Like they used to tell us back when we were forced into the cold autumn forest tracks for primary school P.E. terrain run competitions, freezing our yet-to-be-developed gonads off in the spirit of our parents’ enjoying a rousing session of good sportsmanship by association (what, bitter, me? Perish the thought), “everyone is a winner”. Of course in this case, it’s “winner” in the sense of “won the special Olympics”, but whatever.

Animation and Visuals: 5/10 – I see a rainbow-coloured cast of wigs and I want it painted black.

Amagami SS takes place in a high school environment, and features a graphics perfectly 'in line' with the standards of the genre. It has some decently painted and detailed backgrounds, generally low use of background events and environmental effects, some derivative character models, and in a shocking departure from the norm of these kinds of shows, a mostly sane array of hair colours (i.e. black, with one or two brown-haired ones). Overall it's fair, but it’s really not *excelling* in any meaningful way. Compared to, say, Angel Beats! or Toradora, its number of locales speak for it. However, it can’t match the former in razzle dazzle colours and visual effects, and can’t match the latter in expressive characters, clever use of background events, and body language. It’s there, that’s it, it’s not what I’m willing to spend 2000 words on here. Moving on.

Audio: 5/10 – Well, it’s not music to invade Poland to… Ah, carp. Sorry, will happen again.

The audio of Amagami SS is about as distinctive as its visuals. That is to say, nothing to really pain me, but nothing really to stand out. I remember it *had* music, but I’ll be damned if I will ever remember any of it. The openings are standard sad J-pop pieces about appropriate true love and being oneself, of the kind this type of show usually favours: It does its job as it should but leaves little in the way of a permanent impression.

The voicework is decent and has a few pieces of energy in it – even though the protagonist of the usually nasally kind – especially with some of the more energetic/dramatic members of the female cast. Oh, and Joji Nakata is the narrator of one of the arcs, delivering a voice so smarmy I swear he could melt butter with it (if you can’t tell, it’s sort of a “high point”, at least by this series’ standards). Other than that, it’s not really much to say.

Story: 6/10 – “What happens when you compress the story into four episodes each?” “Well, the progression gets ****ed, doesn’t it?” “…Proper ****ed?” “Yeah, Tommy. Before ze Germans get there.”

The much-touted multi-story feature of Amagami SS takes place over a six arcs, with each arc covering an alternate timeline/alternate dimension/whatever concerning our main character getting together with another girl. But before I get ahead of myself describing the individual stories, or rather the ways in which they’re not very individual, let’s get to the starting point: Meet Junichi Tachibana, a Normal High School Student who came down with a tragic case of Tragic Love Backstory (one of the most feared diseases faced by all Japanese high school students, apparently, given how afraid most of them are of it: Personally I see it much more seldom than Kidnapped By Mystical Girl and Brought to Brave New World, Accidentally Given Control of Giant Robot with Superpowers, but then again I guess there’s no preventive measures against that one). As a result, he’s apparently become sullen and introspective and has scorned love (but not to any degree that his personality is any memorably mismatched from any other male milquetoasts that serve as malefactors in this manner of memoir… I’ll stop now). Oh, and he spends most of his time in a closet (take that for what you will; I know I took it for a source of much malicious mockery).

From these humble origins, each arc basically throws down in this manner: Junichi starts out as his usually non-defined self, when he gets close to one of the principal girls of the cast in one manner or another – aside from the fact that most of these girls are all apparently single and all too willing to humour his advances with little justification, most of these ‘approach’ scenarios are fairly well done for their genre – queue three episodes of courtship, arc over, happy ending. Wham, bam, thank you ma’am, return to start and collect no character development, memories or two hundred dollars but with a new beau on the horizon.

The stories, while taking into account the girls’ varying personalities, interests and life situations, are also fairly standard and formulaic: Some fifteen minutes of clumsy come-ons from Junichi, girl becomes interested and opening of date, two episodes’ worth of everyday flirtation and relationship building, cut to climax at the end of third episode and girl’s issues start bubbling to the surface, ten minutes of climax fixing girl, two minutes of implied consummation, cut to happy ending. It’s all pretty much by the book. The only exception to this is the arc of Rihoko, the ‘tragically overlooked friend since childhood who secretly had a crush on hero’ type, which is entirely from her point of view and features Junichi as little more than a supporting character.

So, up in all this exposition, what’s my take on it? On the plus side the stories are varied enough to not be complete rethreads (especially with Rihoko’s arc thrown into the bargain), very little dead time or filler, almost all the characters get equal screentime, no blatant ‘Winning Girl’ overall, and you don’t easily grow tired of any one character’s overexposure (except possibly the male). On the negative sides, the stories are short, cut to the bone, have an odd progression, seem almost a bit too convenient at times, are close enough that they are utterly predictable for the most part, individually unremarkable, and, of course, the whole thing smacks of wish fulfilment for getting the man be the stud and get all the girls but without being a lecherous jerk like in School Days. It’s a net gain for the series, but a close call.

One plus point I will give it -- and this is one that I actually feel is worthy of some acclamations, is that it managed to get a little sister with little to no incestual subtext. She even got an OVA episode, which was surprisingly free of the usual clichés and actually rather nice.

Characters: 6/10 – A decent potential for the females, ruined somewhat by the lack of time given each of them.

Being that this show is essentially a series of romance stories, it’s inevitable that this is heavily character-driven: Much of the quality must stem from the main leads and from their chemistry. Anyone even remotely familiar with Japanese dating sims/harem anime will be able to recognize the characters more or less instantly. The male is a fairly standard “featureless audience stand-in harem lead”, with his mildly perverted streak (oh, the heights of originality) and his “I-Got-Dumped” backstory being his defining characteristics. The girls consist of the hot upperclassman “older sister” type, the tomboy, the “shrinking violet” underclassman type, the “silent and sensible” type, the “one-sided crush childhood friend type” (who to be fair hides it fairly well under a façade of “energetic funny clumsy girl” type), and the “two-faced bitch” type. To say this show is blessed with over-abundance of originality in the character concepts would be a bald-faced lie, but on a level beyond the conceptual, how does it at least treat these characters?

Fairly well, actually. And herein lies the main problem with the characters department: Amagami SS’ characters are fairly archetypical, but the show is able to show clearly that it can work with these archetypes to make something interesting out of at least *some* of the characters (the shrinking violet was beyond redemption, though). Junichi, for instance, is able to appear somewhat nuanced after you’ve seen him in action – across some four to five different arcs. But he’s the only one who gets this sort of screen time, because all the females only get four episodes each. This means that the characters who are actually the most interesting to study paradoxically gets less attention and time than the guy who remains essensially unchanged by the show at a whole because of the constant resets. It’s like watching someone putting together a jigsaw puzzle, but is forced to give up after half the pieces due to time constraints, done some half a dozen times over, and the picture is the same every time and is that of the male lead. In non-crazy-metaphor-speak: All the females have interesting execution but too many holes and too little time, and are defined a bit too much by their attraction to the main character -- oh, sure, not White Album levels, thankfully, but it's there.

What little time is given manages to get across decent chemistry for at least half of them, rendering some of the romances decent, but I still think they're undersold. At least the arc-based system limits the pain of certain of the females, allows each one of them their chance to shine, show their individual good sides without being overshadowed by any of their others, and give fans of the individual archetypes their due. On a negative side, it more or less ensures that the individual females will be less developed, less explored, and inevitably be less memorable on the long run than a single 26-episode-explored Winning Girl. It’s like communism, for female dating sim love interests. With less being hijacked by Stalin, invading Eastern Europe, purges, gulags, and winning World War II. So come to think of it, not really like communism at all.

Value: 5/10 – Yes, well, *this* thing’s reputation isn’t entirely going to last “one zousand years!”…

Although the show’s big selling point, the resetting timelines and exploration of several different love plots over arcs, is implemented better and more noticeably here than Kimikiss (if we ignore that the repeating ‘Groundhog Day loop’ plot has been a part of popular culture since, well, Groundhog Day), the contents of the story are more than enough to see this breath of fresh air grow stale. And, thanks to said loop, we get to see them grow stale multiple times even! Oh, all right, that’s going a bit too far. While they’re individually archetypical, having the story focus on every single one of the girls makes the story a bit more variant than most.

That doesn’t reduce the fact that this isn’t exactly a big step forward for romance anime, and I doubt this will lead to a revolution in how these things will be made in the future (especially when the only other ‘big’ anime using it to date was Yosuga no Sora, which to Amagami SS is something akin to having the big facial feature you want people to remember about you being the Toothbrush moustache). The odds of this thing going to be remembered for all time (or even a decade) is pretty slim, mainly because it’s not one big story but five small ones with the same amount of care and detail given them (i.e. not that much). It’s like getting five decent to mediocre paintings instead of only one, larger painting: They’re better as long as the one painting is crap (like with most other harem anime) but will never be able to stand up to the uniqueness of one, good, coherent painting.

If you liked this show, there’s a world of single-story romance anime out waiting for you to try them: I can point you towards, oh, Kanon, Lovely Complex, Kimi ni Todoke, possibly Toradora… There’s a lot. If you specifically want a ‘groundhog loop’ scenario, you can watch Higurashi. If you want them both… There’s this. And the aforementioned Yosuga no Sora. Which I personally would only recommend if you’ve already *tried* trepanation and would like something a bit *more* extreme towards the integrity of your head and its contents (you’d pretty much have to be trepanated to make it through the inevitable migraine anyway).

Enjoyment: 6/10 – Another fine example in how to turn the emotion of love into a form of bemused… Bemusedness. With some amusedness. At least this one *had* amusement factor.

Although the fog of ages (or months) may have scoured some of my memories of this show, the overall impression appears to have been ‘not as bad as it could have been’. The lovestories were hit-or-miss: Due to their similarities I had to basically base my entertainment entirely on the winning girl of each arc, leaving to one fairly good arc (the tomboy), two surprisingly interesting ones (the unlucky childhood friend with the POV change and the sister OVA), most of them average ones (upperclassman, serious swimming girl, two-face), one that was even more rushed and unjustified (the stalker OVA), and one saved by the narrator (Nakata arc).

Ultimately, very few true impressions of emotions are left of this show otherwise, apart perhaps from “Joji Nakata should be narrating more anime”: This speaks to me that the show, although decent for light entertainment and slice-of-life, was perhaps not the riveting love stories they should have been. I think I liked it about above average; it’s not a bad enjoyment factor, with a few not-to-shabby jokes and a few of the arcs showing some, if nothing else, decent chemistry and relationship progression, if hampered by the inevitable time constraints. It lacked the high points of Toradora, but also the low points, and is better than most harem I've seen.

Overall, Amagami SS is just not unique enough, snappy enough and just a little bit toothless. It's sort of like this review in that way (I blame the lack of lack of quality; it’s not bad enough to get really sarcastic over). Which only leads me to finish this on a similar note of originality and taste:

Total: 5.5 (rounded up to 6)/10 – Lacks the drive, energy and memorability of its original namesake. On the plus side it exterminated less Jews and conquered less of Europe, so I'd say it's a net gain.

So in case you wondered: Yes. I did, in fact, sit through this whole show just so I could make an Amagami Schutzstaffel joke here. I made several. They were quite crude, obvious, derivative and quite mediocre, and probably only partially entertaining. Much like my impression of the show. So, then, was it worth it?

…No, not entirely, no But I did it anyway, and would probably do it again if given the chance.

Amagami SS is an interesting take on the traditional romance anime; instead of choosing one path and then having to make OVAs for the other paths, why not showcase all of them together! Thus you have a ~26-episode slice of life comedy/romance where Junichi eventually wins the heart of six plus one different girls (plus one because Risa only gets one episode rather than an entire arc, and Junichi already had the heart (in a non-incest way) of his Ni-shi-shi little sister the entire time).

Though it may seem a bit choppy having the main character choose different paths (previous heroines show up as "cameo" appearances later), the plot sequence and character development for each arc is superbly done. And as mentioned by previous reviewers, the girls are all very unique so you're bound to find someone to root for.

All in all this is a pretty good romance with a smudging of occasional humor.

Animation:
The animation is good for its era, with crisp lines and solid coloring. The character designs, like the character personalities, give each heroine a unique style, though all are cute in their own way. My only qualm is that the "fat" girl (Rihoko) is still relatively thin by American standards, guess there is a culture gap after all... The actual setting isn't anything all that special, mostly around school with a few deviations. There isn't any particular color emphasis as I guess they were emphasizing the normalcy of it all and how Junichi can be any male viewer, who happened to have been dumped in the past and what not.

Sound:
The OPs are fairly decent but not so much to be collect worthy. The first OP is a light and playful tune, which is a good fit for the mood in the series. The second OP is a bit more decisive but still relatively light-hearted. Each of the 8 (six main arcs + Risa + Miya) girls has their own ED. The BGM is supportive and fun but nothing that special. What really stands out in this category is the VAs. Itou Shizuka gives so much personality to Haruka that her seductiveness approaches Horo levels at times. Nazuka Kaori also did a great job with Ayatsuji as it must have been very difficult to make her personality switch feel natural.

Story:
Tachibana has been heartbroken and gf-less for two years, after a date ditched him on their Christmas date. Now he gets a second chance as new encounters with girls abound. You pretty much know what's coming in most of the arcs but how they get there is fairly unique at times and creates some moments of tension (like that feeling in the air before you kiss) that are just great. Some arcs are bound to be better than others, and obviously impressions will be based on personal taste. I liked the Sae arc but my friend skipped the entire thing. Not all paths are linear as well as Junichi faces significant challenges on the way to winning each girl's heart.

Character:
The character development is wonderful, and you get a feeling that the character bonds indeed grow as each arc progresses. Tachibana himself is an interesting character has he is somewhat nice and shy at first, typical, but a bit different from normal harem guys in that he can actually make decisions and hard choices. Though I'm not fooling anyone- it's the girls that really define this series. Haruka, Sae, and Ayatsuji were the standouts for me as each have very different tastes and personalities and were just fun to watch as they interacted with Junichi (whose head voice you hear repeatedly through the series).

Value:
This is a very good light romance watch. You get a believable work with girls slowly liking a guy (w/o the girl vs. girl drama traditionally associated with these) and a very good story progression to go along with it. Add in a nice supporting cast with a interesting sister and you've got yourself a winning package.

Next on my line of harems to spite comes Amagami SS (Jesus, I’m still on letter A). This anime is somewhat weird to talk about as it is constantly deletes the progress in the story. Before I get to nerdraeg about the show, first I must clear my thoughts on one of the most dreaded recent additions to one of the stalest and lamest anime categories ever.

There is this scenario format where the story resets every few episodes, just so the lead character can choose a different action in some point in his life that will change the later events of the story. It is an element introduced by date sims, where there you chose a girl and move towards winning her. Replaying the game by choosing a different girl, meaning following a different path. This in anime terms, means that time resets and you get to see the same things again, only this time the character will go for a different girl. This is the chance to win all the girls, one at a time
… and it sucks.

I am vertically negative towards such a trope in anime form, thus I am writing a biased review from the start (as if hating harems wasn’t enough already). Some may like the option of having the guy winning all the girls and making time reset so to see how things will turn out if you make a different choice somewhere in your life. Although this concept was quite interesting in movies such as Groundhog Day or The Butterfly Effect for showing you how fragile the outcome of the future can be, here it is nothing but a lame excuse to render all character development and the gravity of one’s choice completely useless.

Another thing I want to mention is that unlike in the above movies where the lead remembers each reset, here he does not. Every time is like we watch a different alternative reality, making even the notion of maturing and learning from your past (or possible future) mistakes equally useless.

And finally, I want to make clear that Amagami IS A HAREM despite some refusing to accept it as one because the lead goes for one girl at a time and there are no cat fights. Well excuse me but one guy surrounded by pretty chicks, and he needs to pick one, counts as a harem, even when the choice is clear from the start. The oldest and most famous harems are Love Hina and Ah My Goddess and there the chosen girl was also clear from the start. Thus Amagami IS A HAREM like it or not.

So starting from the worst part, the story, I say it is bollocks. Using the reset button after the lead wins a girl means we practically watch 7 short romantic comedies of roughly 4 episodes each. The same characters are present in all of them but their interactions are different each time, so you might as well consider this a collection of similar short romantic school life stories, with the same actors in each one (sometimes called an Omnibus). Thus we practically have a typical slice of life school romance that begins and ends in 4 episodes maximum before throwing to the bin all that happened and going back to square 1, where we see the same formula, but with a different girl being the main target. Some may like this gimmick for making them feel like they are watching a date sim in anime form
… but I find it stupid as heck. Here I am watching a story unfold and then is deleted like it doesn’t mean anything.

It’s not like I reject the notion of the reset. It is ok in date sims and it was great when they implemented it in Tatami Galaxy. Using it here, in a typical story about typical people, feels disappoint. What is the point? Some will say it is a great way to please all shippers, which are guys who prefer one specific girl to end up with the lead and even argue with others who prefer a different girl. All these dudes can just choose the arc where the lead wins their favorite girl and reject all others, so everybody is happy.

Again, I am against that. Making an important choice in your life means to reject all other possible options. Winning something means at the same time losing everything else. The little pebble you chose out of a huge rubble of other pebbles will be more important to you that all the rest you sacrificed just to get this one. So what is this crap; doing anything I want and forgetting everything just to do something different? It sounds like cowardice in the least. Where is the importance of choosing? What is the point in having free will without the notion that you can’t undo what you chose to do?

Enough with that babble; it’s practically off-topic and random rant visualized by a biased mindset that loves to space out and overanalyze shitz. Let’s talk about the cast a bit; shall we? What we basically have here is seven girls and a main lead, teasing each other in a game of who gets to win whom. The lead is not the usual spineless dork of harems, as he is quite open with his feelings. Well, it’s not like he had the time not to be; he is roughly given enough time to waste in indecisiveness in a show of short arcs. He practically fools around a bit and confesses his love rather fast, the girl also agrees rather fast, the arc ends in a weird or funny moment and abracadabra we are transported in a different alternative reality where he now pulls the same with a different girl. Takes away all sense of progress or meaningfulness.
… Woops, again with that off topic fuss.

The girls themselves are practically seven basic archetypes, found in many date sims, each accompanied by some clothing fetish to act as a vague character trait, just so we can set them apart easier.
Yeah, we get to remember them as an archetype and a fetish; how romantic and noble for the female genre.
But it is true that although they are stereotypical caricatures, they get colorized very well throughout the series. The nice visuals, the good voice acting, the romantic foreplay, all that work fine at bringing out all that it’s available on each archetypical trait.

So they may all be omelets but you will not get to confuse one omelet with another, thanks to the cooks’ ability to bring out a special and unique flavor on each one of them. After that, it all has to do with your own personal perverted fetish … errr, I mean taste. If girl A is better than girl B will be up to you and not because some are not as well done … errr, well presented as others.

Other than that, they are not special or memorable for any given reason.

Animation and sound do their work in a fine way, helping you to get in the light and fuzzy feeling of the show. The backgrounds and the character figures are nicely drawn and colored, there is attention given to various lightings effects and camera angles. Voice acting is good, if you don’t find the rather high pitched voices that weird. Music themes are good and fitting for such a type of show.

But again, after all is done I found nothing memorable in all this fuss. It was just an average school setting with average people doing average things. Average is a hard thing to remember you know; it is so much easier to remember very happy or very bad moments. But this comes to no surprise for a show made by studio AIC, which is infamous for its anime soups. The director is also some nobody who never managed to produce a good anime. It has a very good pacing and atmosphere for its kind, while visuals and sound are quite nice. Other than that, there is nothing overall WOW in it; just a typical omelet that was cooked nicely. Plus that reset thing GOD I HATE IT.

If we had a story about a guy gradually mating and separating with girls until he finds the proper one in the end, as corny as it would be it would still be more solid and memorable than THIS mess.

'Amagami SS' is based on galge (non-hentai dating-sim) 'Amagami'. The title means "light bite", which probably describes the playfulness and cuteness of the heroines (half of them do bite or get bitten). "SS" is believed to stand for "Short Stories". It is the most comprehensive and game-like anime I have ever seen that's based on a dating-sim.

Story: 8/10
'Amagami SS' is made up of 7 short stories where the protagonist goes after a different girl each time. The heroines are made up of the most common archetypes for galge or moe anime. The reason I say this series is the most comprehensive, however, is because there's a wide spectrum of heroines and the protagonist's personality also changes depending on who he's going after. What we have here is not just an average indecisive main character in a harem, we get to see all kinds of personality match ups, and it's more realistic because we behave differently in front of different people, especially in romantic relationships. In addition, there were all sorts of hentai fetishes and endings for each arc. I will touch on this subject little more in the Character section, but I really liked this about 'Amagami SS' because it's harder to get tired of the story even if same events are repeated 7 times.

Another thing that really struck me was how watching this series really felt like playing a galge. There's been plenty of galge/eroge anime adaptations before, but most of them seemed to follow a single route or one combined route. Every such series I have seen so far gave me a sense of a set story. Boy meets girl(s), everyone fall for him, but eventually he ends up with girl A over all other girls, or unable to choose for the indecisiveness. In 'Amagami SS', we know exactly who we're going after like picking a route in advance, and then protagonist come in contact with the heroine like every other series. But here, they clearly spell out the possible options; the protagonist frequently think to himself "should I do this or that?" or another character asks "are you coming or not?". While this may be considered poor scriptwriting, it gives us a sense that the main character is actually making a choice himself rather than fate or where the wind takes him. It actually feels like he's consciously making decisions to win over a girl, just like how a player should in the game. Sometimes it's the girl trying to win him over too.

The final episode also explains why the other girls back off when he goes after a particular girl (assuming it's when Risa gives up).

Character: 7/10
One of the better protagonist around. There are moments when he gets reluctant or miss the signals, but he is not nearly indecisive nor thickheaded as our typical anime main character. He actually goes after the girls most of the time, and confess his love every single time. In rare occasions when the girls are chasing after him, he notices the girl's unnatural behavior. The girls are still more interesting in him than they should be, but it's far more tolerable because he worked for all of their attention. He also has just the right amount of perversity, which gave us viewers the right amount of fan service, and had relatively rational motives.

The heroines are very diverse, each with a distinct personality and status. The main character behaves differently to win them over, and indulges in all sorts of fetishes in the process.

To summarize each arc, [Name]: [Personality type (Translation)] [Status] - [Fetish]

Morishima Haruka: Nonki (Carefree) Princess - Behind the knee
Tanamachi Kaoru: Yancha (Boyish) Girl Buddy - Bellybutton
Nakata Sae: Uchiki (Shy) Kouhai - Student/instructor play, maid play, loli
Nanasaki Ai: Cool (Composed) Athlete - Tiny tits, cosplay
Sakurai Rihiko: Tennen (Airheaded) Childhood Friend - Huge boobs
Ayatsuji Tsukasa: Seijun (Pure/Innocent) Valedictorian - Trapped in room
Kamizaki Risa: Osekkai (Nosy) Stalker - None

...Who are we kidding?


All the girls are not as dumb as typical harem heroines, and behaved relatively rationally. There's at least 1 girl that suites your taste no matter what kind of girls you're into.

Character developments are poor and love triangle didn't exist, but for the purpose of galge anime adaptation, their cameo-like appearances were very appropriate since they didn't detract from the main story.

Art: 7/10
All the girls are cute and pretty as they should be, very visually pleasing. Backgrounds are decent. Nothing particularly impressive about it, but tried and tested style that projects the peaceful high school life atmosphere. There were also couple of scenes with great composition and camera movements.

Sound: 8/10
With exception to Konno Hiromi (Sae), everyone sounded like they should. She is a shy character, but the strained high-pitch voice was just too annoying. Itou Shizuka (Haruka) and Satou Rina (Kaoru) were solid as usual.

BGM is rather ordinary, but fits the romantic scenes pretty well.

OP1 'i Love' by azusa was an extremely strong theme song for a seishun series, and the OP animation had a nice flow that introduced the heroines well and represented their personality well with their signature poses.
OP2 and EDs were above average as well, and appropriate.
ED3 is a soft song that makes us reflect on all the girls conquered before.

Value/Enjoyment: 8/10
'Amagami SS' is a rather conservative seishun (coming of age romance) series that was wonderfully executed. Although things go a bit too well for the protagonist and character development was limited, it depicted the flushing, awkward, and bittersweet high school romance very well. A great simple heartwarming romance anime.

The comedy series was also pretty funny without being distracting to the romance, and came off very naturally. It was a very solid series all around that I enjoyed a lot more than I expected from a galge adaptation.