Why was this made? I mean, apart from completely raping the Kurenai TV-Series, perhaps? If I were someone who reads manga, this would totally take away any motivation I would have had to buy and check out the manga. Please, someone. Tell me that the manga is more than just this endless string of silly and pointless side-stories!
The past two episodes have just been strings of random stories, without everything tying them together aside from a bunch of badly written characters. In the first segment there is this violent blond girl who is really depressed and somehow ends up making friends with Murasaki and hugs Shinkuro out of nowhere. The second segment sees all of the main females discovering a porn stash of the tenant that lived in Shinkuro’s apartment before he started living there, and the third was just a bunch of girls randomly talking about Shinkuro.
The worst thing about these OVAs is the terrible acting, though. What once was a mature series has now been reduced to a silly harem with stock characters who can only think about silly romantic misunderstandings. Murasaki ends up climbing a tree in order to search for Shinkurou at school, everyone obsesses endlessly over that porn stash of Shinkurou; it’s all just pointless.
And the weird thing is that Kou Matsuou is still responsible for this OVA. Why didn’t he give it the same treatment as he gave the Kurenai TV-series? He could have could have made some great filler like with the musical episode. Heck, he could even have created the start of an interesting story, that doesn’t fit into two episodes. EVERYTHING but this.
OVA Episode Rating: 5/10
This was based entirely off the original material. It’s the -TV Series- that deviated and did its own thing. Hence, the fans are split into two factions : one that loves it and one that hates it (preferring the manga feel instead.)
@frellisa : yup you’re completely right.The ones who hates it are these who disappointed by the artworks of the adaptation.
Basicly considering quite a few manga readers hate the anime and people who’ve seen the anime first tend to hate the manga i wouldn’t be surprised if they were so different.
“Why didn’t he give it the same treatment as he gave the Kurenai TV-series?”
Because producers told him not to?If this is being shipped with a manga,the target audience is manga readers so to satisfy manga readers the producers ask for something close to the manga.
Probably Kurenai TV was one good experiment gone wrong: People just look out for boobs and brainless entertainment nowadays, so why to bother adding depth to a story when it’s not actually required? As a matter of fact, Kurenai manga is not bad, of course it’s never as deep as the anime tv counterpart. But people wanted the anime as brainless as the manga. So why bother to add more?
The real issue here is that Kurenai is composed from several arc stories, but they’re just extracting pointless episodes instead of animating a whole arc. This brings many plot holes, such as this blonde-depressed girl that appeared and you don’t know where the hell she came from! Moreover they’re making up new pointless anime-only chapter that really don’t add nothing to the plot. I’d petition an whole new arc to be animeted and forget the oav asap!
SPOILER about the blonde chick: If you’ve seen Tolove Ru (i doubt it), that’s excatly just like Golden Darkness, an assassin that’s enemy of the main lead at start, but eventualy came to fall in love with him for no apparent reason whatsoever. (just how typical of harem series)
Thank you for reviewing this so I can avoid this like the plague. After the Kurenai anime, I picked up the manga and was completely disappointed. I wish Kou Matsuou was let loose to do what he wants because what he did was Kurenai was elevate the material ten-fold and created a mature and thoughtful series. There are plenty of pointless harem anime. This doesn’t need to be one.
Hmm, I see some clarification is in order here – Kurenai is originally a series of LIGHT NOVELS. The manga itself is an adaption. I wouldn’t be too surprised if the TV series simply looked more to the real original material. This would not be the first time a manga adaption turned strong mature material into something less so. Spice and Wolf were originally light novels, and the manga has a reputation for bad, tasteless fanservice (it gave Horo oversized attributes, lord help us)
That said, I too appreciate the warning about the OVA, as the TV series’ style hit my sweet spot.
@Z.N. Singer, thanks for the clarification. From a quick google, it doesn’t appear that anyone is doing a translation of the light novel.
Z.N. Singer do you know for sure the Light Novels are better source material or is it just a claim? I wouldn’t speak about what i myself didn’t know.
@Solaris I said ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if’. That’s not a claim at all. In fact, it’s an admission that I don’t actually know. As Belle says, there’s no translation. Which is a pity, as I would love to find out.
Me too wants to find :/
Actually LNs are usually better than any anime adaptation. I really wanted to know more about it.
The manga is not a representation of the story in the light novels, the light novel story is very dark and hardly comedic at all. The manga is full of side stories and fun arcs that seem to take place when most of the issues are already over.
So if you’re thinking “I don’t get why ppl think the Kurenai tv series is crap compared to the original”.. well you still won’t by watching these ovas.
These are bundled with the manga volumes by the way so of course people who buy the manga are going to like them anyway…