Love comes at you in all kinds of forms and ways, just usually not all at once like this!
What They Say:
Kaoru is a college boy living with his fiancé Aoi, but family complications are forcing them to keep their engagement secret. Countless steamy situations arise as a variety of babes start moving in to their mansion. They can’t get enough of Kaoru—they’re even invading his bed! Two is company and eight is a party in this romping romance brought to you by the director of Saber Marionette J.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
If there’s one kind of show we can expect to come out pretty regularly, it’s a romantic comedy. I’m a big fan of romantic comedies from when I first got into anime, though they were much harder to find back then. With these shows, I usually put myself into the mindset of viewing them as someone whose just getting into romantic comedies and it’s all new to them. After all, anime is all new to someone the first time they get into it, and I like to retain some of that magic if I can, especially considering how many titles I end up seeing. Ai Yori Aoshi really manages to push things beyond what we normally get for a romantic series. The first four episodes here usually would have been done in one or two episodes at most in many series, but instead gets the time to really move slowly here and to allow you to have time with the characters. This turns out to be very important in the end.
The series kicks off by introducing us to college student Kaoru Hanabishi. Yes, college student. He’s living on his own in the big city, has a nice small apartment where he lives and in general is happy with his life. He doesn’t have a girlfriend, but he’s got a small number of friends in the Photo Club at school and is otherwise just focusing on his studies, but not to an extreme. By all appearances, Kaoru is an average likable guy.
Enter Aoi Sakuraba, a young woman the same age as him who has just arrived into the city by train. She’s not gotten out much in her life, so the combination of her in her kimono and sandals and her uncertainty as she walks through the terminal gets her some attention, but not much overall. She’s very lost at this point, and ends up dropping her ticket only to have Kaoru be there and pick it up. Being the nice guy that he is, he offers to help her find her way and going so far as to actually go with her on the train since they’re using the same one, so she can find the person she’s looking for.
This isn’t really a forced area, since you know that Aoi is looking for Kaoru, but she never says the name and he never offers his, and it’s not until he offers her a place to stay for the night while she figures out what to do when the place she arrives at is actually an empty lot that the pieces begin to click and it all comes together. She shows Kaoru a picture of her in her childhood days, and Kaoru instantly recognizes himself and the little girl in it. The two hadn’t seen each other in likely a dozen years, so the lack of recognition is spot on and believable, and the two end up being very happy to have found each other again.
Well, Kaoru is happy until Aoi tells him that she’s come here to be his wife as that was what she was raised to be all these years. Kaoru is just stunned by this, but then he starts to figure out that it may be part of the Hanabishi families plan to get him to come back and be part of the clan again, something he steadfastly refuses for a number of valid reasons that we see in flashbacks. But we then learn that Aoi has actually come here without her parents permission or knowledge, since she just wants to know why Kaoru had left, thinking she was the cause of it all.
While these misunderstandings play an important part to the beginning of the show, they merely set the stage for the development of their romance as both begin to really fall for each other. Aoi had been raised for years and years to server Kaoru, and she does everything that she can to make him happy, which conversely makes her happy. He’s uncertain about a lot of this, but as the two spend more and more time together, you can see him falling very hard for her. And it’s easy to see why as well. For a romantic show, Aoi definitely falls under the category of an ideal dream Japanese wife.
Where things begin to change, and not all that badly, is when Aoi’s mother comes to discuss things with her daughter and to look over Kaoru. As Aoi actually asserts herself with her mother, she insists upon staying with Kaoru, and her mother ends up approving of her daughters plan. But there’s plans within plans, as Aoi’s mother sets her “nanny” Miyabi to watch over Aoi as she starts this new life. Aoi and Kaoru must also not let their romance become public knowledge, as the Sakuraba Conglomerate is a large and powerful one and cannot have that stain show up against them.
So the two plus Miyabi end up in a family “country” mansion just outside the city, with Aoi and Miyabi in the house proper and Kaoru in the guest house but having to do all the work in both houses. It’s here that things slowly start developing that “Tenchi” feel, as Miyabi begins to warm to Kaoru and we then get introduced to a ditzy woman who just joined the Photo Club. She’s also being taken advantage of by the other members in posing in a lot of cosplay photos for the lecherous members.
All the way through episode four, I was very much won over by this series, loved the pacing, the romance, the reasons given for Kaoru’s leaving, the animation…. Well, all of it really. Episode five gives a serious boost to Tenchi–itis though, as one of the Photo Club members from the previous year returns from traveling over the world. Young, blonde and American, Tina enters the show and just adds that over the top element that you wish wasn’t there. Her method of greeting other women? Squeezing their breasts and comment on the size. She’s a bit of a drunk, does whatever she feels like and in general is someone you only want to know part of the time or to have around during a party. Her presence in the show really throws things off, especially when she moves into the mansion as a tenant.
In Summary:
I loved the way this show played out up until the fifth episode that just getting the small bits in future episodes is definitely worthwhile until things turn back to the primary couple. This show really came in as a surprise, as I wasn’t expecting more than another Tenchi clone but ended up with something far stronger. This is definitely worth checking out and is very recommended.
Grade: B+
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
