Princess Lover

Remember when you saw Lucky Star, and you thought, “Wow, Minoru Shiraishi should get a role as some other character. He should play some vocal and flamboyant guy that doesn’t know when to shut up.” Oh wait, that’s right, you didn’t. Sorry to say, but Minoru Shiraishi isn’t the only thing that makes Princess Lover suck.

Don’t get me wrong, Princess Lover does have aspects that I appreciate. One of those aspects would be the choice of censorship. Instead of it taking the form of steam (Girls Bravo) or a large bat (Rosario to Vampire), it takes the form of a shadow. It looks more natural (most of the time), and it’s not nearly as obnoxious as the censorship found in the series aforementioned. And the other aspect would be the artwork. Not only is it good, there’s no glaring contrast between the style used in the backdrops and style used for the characters. But I digress.

The real problem I have with Princess Lover is that it lacks consistent direction. One moment it’s a comedy with fan service, and the next, it’s a serious drama. The worst part of all is that it keeps shifting back and forth uncomfortably between the two genres, as if the directors weren’t really sure what they wanted to do with the series. Now the serious drama-comedy with a bit of fan service has been done before, and it has been done well. I for one like to think that Full Metal Panic struck the right balance between the two.

One of the other things that really annoyed me was how immobile the villains were in certain situations. In one scene, the main villain has our hero held at gun point, and instead of just shooting him at point blank range, the villain allows him to reclaim his weapon! And this is an ongoing thing throughout the series. “Hi, I’ve got a gun. I should be shooting you, but instead I’m going to sit here and let you totally own me.”

The last thing I have to say about Princess Lover that really drove me nuts was the anticlimactic face-off between our hero and the villain. He finally finds the guy that killed his parents, and he more or less lets him go. But wait, it gets worse. He doesn’t just let him go; he goes off on some tangent about how one of the characters taught him that our deceased loved ones live on in our memories, and that the villain should consider the righteousness of his actions. And all of this is happening while some random jpop song is playing in the background. Wow, I’m at a loss for words.

Maybe I am being a bit too harsh to an anime that was based off an eroge, but just because it’s based on an adult videogame doesn’t mean that it has to be bad.

6/10

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