Title: Date A Live
Genre: Comedy, Romance, Harem
Publisher: AIC Plus (JP), Funimation (US)
Original Creator: Koushi Tachibana
Director: Keitarou Motonaga
Series Composition: Hideki Shirane
Music Composer: Go Sakabe
Official Release Date: June 10, 2014
Title: Date A LiveMost anime nowadays feel like they’re selling themselves short on what they can accomplish because the material they’ve been adapted from is ongoing. This means a rushed storyline, a bad ending, and that leads to feeling terrible and like your time has been sorely wasted. Date A Live, however, is probably the first series I’ve watched from beginning to end in a while that felt entirely that it was already guaranteed for a second season (which it was). This meant leaving out a lot of plot points which lead to frustration and a lack of consistency. Despite all that, however, Date A Live is a decent show that’s worth a watch over a few days.
The story, written by Koushi Tachibana and serialized in Fujimi Shobo’s Dragon Magazine as a light novel, revolves around Shido Itsuka (Nobunaga Shimazaki/Josh Grelle), a boring protagonist who lives in a world where spatial quakes (or space quakes), destructive forces of nature that appear at random, terrorize Japan as a result of a catastrophe 30 years ago. When Shido hears the announcement that a spatial quake is coming and he’s hiding, he believes his little sister, Kotori (Ayana Taketatsu/Bryn Apprill), is at the designated location they both said they’d meet up at in the morning. Fearing for her safety, he heads over to the area and gets caught up in the spatial quake.
However, after surviving the quake, Shido ends up meeting a heavy armored woman at the quake’s crater, and before he knows it, he’s immediately threatened by her and on death’s bed. He ends up getting saved by a group called AST (Anti-Spirit Team), but manages to get knocked out from the battle. When he wakes up, he finds himself inside Ratatoskr, where he is told about spirits, his sister actually being the commander, and how in order to save the spirits from getting killed, Shido has to date them and get their attention.
Date A Live, on the surface, seems like a lesser version of The World God Only Knows. However, instead of having an actual character take the lead, we have the usual male personality that shows an occasional bite or two since Shido is the same as most shows with this type of premise. Instead of understanding what’s actually going on in the minds of the girls he’s trying to date, the dates usually end with it not being particularly serious or not allowing us to know what is going on with the characters.
The story attempts to be more than it should be, but the shoddy writing prevents it from being so. Throughout the whole run, we are treated to passive aggressive mumbling on why characters are able to do what they do without explanation (Shido being the only one to seal the spirits power with a kiss, for example), some poor pacing in episodes where it feels entirely sluggish, and unnecessary fanservice. Because some of the characters happen to be in Shido’s school and are either with him or are in different groups throughout the show, it really messes you up when you realize later in the series, “oh wait, those groups have different motives and goals!”
It does enough to not be completely mediocre
Overall though, the sense that I got as I was watching the anime was that everything that needed be explained would be explained later, and by later, I mean in the sequel that got announced as soon as the show ended. Now, you can totally get away with splitting a show up like that, and you can set up the first season for that sequel, but by episode 4 I already felt like everything we could know wouldn’t be explained until the sequel. That’s not a good thing to feel this way when I’m only a third of the way into the series.
Despite all that though, Date A Live was actually still enjoyable to a degree, mostly thanks to some of its characters and the antics they get into. Tobiichi (Misuzu Togashi/Michelle Lee) was probably the best one, with the main lead, Tohka (Marina Inoue/Michelle Rojas), turning out to be the one whose character gets ruined when she was no longer able to use her spirit powers, and thus, is probably closer to disappointing. You also have the little sister character that turns out to be annoying, but in this case, it was easy to get behind Kotori a bit due to her change in personality from when we meet her at the start of the first episode to its end, and what happens to her when one of her secrets is revealed. There are also other characters in the show, and while some of them aren’t memorable, they do their job well enough.
Some of the comedy and battle scenes in the anime were also a factor as to why Date A Live was decent, especially later on, when a spirit who has the ability to change time appears and basically messes everyone up. The actual dates in the show were sometimes hilarious, sometimes decent, since Ratatoskr ends up sending Shido suggestions resembling options in a dating sim game on what he should say. Whenever they choose the worst option, it’s actually fun to see how screwed Shido is when that happens. And boy, does he get screwed over by them.
The voice acting is good…subbed. I lasted two episodes into the dub. I’m not sure if that says more about me or says more about the people who voiced the characters in English, but the less spoken of that, the better. There’s the extra OVA included, but aside from that, not much else unless you like English dub commentaries and trailers. It’s probably not a good thing though when the extras feel as bare bones as the show does.
I think if you’re in need of a light, not so story heavy entertainment show, you can enjoy Date A Live a lot, and it wouldn’t be an absolute chore. Otherwise the show’s mostly not that great, with a lot of questions that it presents no answers to. Maybe they’ll be answered in the sequel somehow.
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Justin
Justin is the founder of Organization Anti-Social Geniuses. Anime & manga fan that likes to blog about anime and manga, is addicted to sports, and weak to crossovers. You can follow Justin on Twitter @Kami_nomi.
Latest posts by Justin (see all)
- Date A Live Season 1 Review - July 10, 2014
- Summer Anime 2014: Aldnoah.Zero Impressions - July 9, 2014
- Reference Resource Mondays: Commenting - July 7, 2014
- Justin’s Bizarre Anime Backlog Adventure, Week 12 - July 3, 2014
- All I Can Do Is Laugh At Manga, Please Join Me In Laughing at Manga - June 30, 2014
