The over-the-top comedy scenes are all incredibly boring and formulaic, and seem to serve little purpose other than to create dramatic interaction between characters that's always thrust into cringey shows of public display.
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Unfortunately, the show seems to vacillate back and forth between wanting to be a slapstick slice-of-life comedy for the first two-thirds (which it is NOT successful at) and a serious romance drama (which it is MILDLY successful at.) This creates some awkward pacing that the series struggles to balance, and though it eventually transitions to mostly-drama toward the end, it takes too long to get there and relies on too many melodramatic drops to offset all the comedic filler to keep the story on track. It takes a few episodes to get going, but it soon establishes a story with an interesting dramatic premise that, while peppered with cliches, is executed well at times. As with every shoujo, the default love triangles get carved out quickly, and a few archetypal supporting characters get thrown in the mix like the girl who only likes pretty people and the NEET (hilariously nicknamed "2D-kun".) The batter, all whipped together, forms the stock-and-barrel shoujo cake, and has all the grounds for being a bad and stereotypical mess.įortunately, Golden Time lived up to my expectations in that is not quite as shallow as it first portrays itself to be. They stumble shortly thereafter upon Linda, Banri's childhood friend, all parsed together under the standard "we're freshmen in college" setting. The viewer is spared mere minutes before meeting Kaga Kouko, a rich, spoiled brat who takes "overly attached girlfriend" well into the "I desperately need a restraining order" territory - especially when she failed to make that first step into being "girlfriend." She's chasing after a fellow rich boy, her highschool crush named Yana, who in his attempts to escape her encounters ours protagonist, Tada Banri. Make no mistake, the show comes on very strong very quickly.
Unlike a title such as Bokura ga Ita, which starts you off with the warm and fuzzy and proceeds to spend 26 episodes slowly making you hate the characters, Golden Time slams you with all that dislike upfront, which actually creates the framework for significant character growth and development that the series attempts heavily to capitalize on.
Thus, when Golden Time opened its first episode showing just how awkward and cringey it could be, I actually ended up going into things with a fair amount of hope.
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As a well-versed connoisseur of the romance/shoujo sphere of anime over the years, I've seen the full range of what the genre has to offer - and unfortunately, most times you roll the dice on a show, you come up short. Story:Golden Time is, in the most ironic of fashions, a romance/comedy series with a fundamental identity crisis.