Nothing spells fun like high school kids that can swap bodies involuntarily.
What They Say:
Being required by their school to be in a club, Yui, Iori, Himeko, Taichi, and Aoki are members of Student Cultural Society. One day, Yui and Aoki come in with a problem… they claim to have swapped bodies last night.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Based on the light novel series written by Sadanatsu Anda, with illustrations by Shiromizakana that also spawned a manga adaptation that began in 2010, Kokoro Connect is a new series from Silver Link. The series is directed by Shinya Kawamo who has done some episode direction work over the last few years and also took on the full directorial duties for the Otome wa Boku ni Koishiteru: Futari no Elder OVA. The series is one that definitely fits into the real world slive of life mold dealing with a group of school students going through their lives. With Silver Link doing the animation, it certainly has a cute look and you can tell quickly that they’re hitting all the expected marks, right down to the cute bounce the girls have in their steps as they move about.
With the show focusing on a private school, the students here have any number of required things that must be done and one of them is that they must belong to a club and be involved in that group activity. The series introduces us to a group of students who all have kind of off interests in a way that end up forming their own club in order to meet the requirements. Calling it the Student Cultural Society, they’ve managed to come together so they can do the things they want since the clubs they wanted either just didn’t exist or there were enough conflicts early on that kept them from staying there without any future problems. Being a loosely formed group like this, that keeps them from being on the same page with a lot of things but it also makes it fun in that everyone comes to the clubroom with different things going on in their lives.
With the club made up of three girls and two boys, it’s got a kind of fun feeling and relaxed nature about it that even has one of the girls, Iori, asking one of the guys which of the girls he’d like to see naked. And he actually gets an answer out. But where the show goes in an unusual and unexpected direction (if you didn’t read the promo material!) is that two of the members, Yui and Aoki, come into the club one day and reveal that their souls have swapped bodies. To make matters worse, it doesn’t take long afterwards for the other boy, Taichi, to end up in Iori’s body. Seeing how he reacts inside her body is certainly amusing at first, as is when Iori comes to find him while in his body, since Taichi’s being accosted by another female student that has a crush on Iori.
This in general leads to some fun confusion, especially as the four of them present what’s happened to Inaba who has a hard time swallowing some of it. Inaba’s questioning does get to the heart of the matter in a sort of smutty way and you have to laugh at it, especially since Inaba does it in a way that just incriminates both of the boys. It’s a bit of a mildly convoluted series of events in order to get to the point of where the series is, having the swapped students settled and trying to figure out what to do next, but it does go by surprisingly quickly as we see it play out. Particularly since we get a small clue about the trick of it all related to the actual body switching involving the amount of time involved and more.
In Summary:
With it just being the start, you can see a lot of potential for silly misunderstandings and sexytimes ahead as they continue to swap with each other as time moves on. With the first episode focusing on the five primary characters, we get to know a little about them but also get a bigger look towards the end as they go home and we touch on their home life in a way that expands the cast. We don’t really get to know the main characters that well here and they are pretty much just basic archetypes, but the premise of the show is one that could be a lot of fun as I always like body swapping stories, especially if they do deal with some of the smutty sides of things with what can happen. With the show being a bit more open with its characters and sexuality form the start, there’s a chance it could have some good bite along the way and have several opportunities to really mess with all of them.
Grade: B
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
