Oh, Date a Live, how have I gone this far without reviewing you? This is a show with a majestic four seasons, an iconic design in the form of one of its leading ladies (Kurumi Tokisaki) getting mountains of attention and her own spinoff, and a legendarily goofy premise: a seemingly normal high school boy must date apocalypticly powerful supernatural girls, because the only way to seal their powers rather than killing them or letting them wreak further destruction is with a kiss.
In my mind, the way to go after this one is arc by arc… which, more or less, ends up meaning girl by girl.
The opening, of course, introduces us to more than most. We meet Shido Itsuka, our everyman who doesn’t know he has magic harem-forming and power-sealing abilities. The fanciful truth is revealed to him as he discovers that the weird unnatural disasters that have plagued the world since the first of their kind killed millions are the wake of the supernatural girls, called Spirits. He’s given the full tutorial by his adoptive little sister, Kotori, who also happens to be the leader of the quirky secret organization Ratatoskr. From their stealth flying battleship, they act as mission control for Shido.
The first Spirit doesn’t have a human name (though Shido gives her one, Tohka), but despite her disconnect with reality doesn’t seem entirely opposed to the idea of being approached and wooed by someone who isn’t terrified of her. Moments with her, though, may be cut short by the arrival of AST, the Anti-Spirit Taskforce. They’re a government-aligned group of apparently all teen girls who use their skimpy mecha musume flight suits to battle the spirits. One in particular, Origami Tobiichi, is skilled, powerful… and a classmate of Shido who despite her flat affect has the hots for him.
In the climax of the arc, as Shido and Tohka seem to be resonating together, Origami takes a shot that ends up hitting Shido and seemingly killing him. Everything goes to hell, but briefly before its revealed that Shido can apparently regenerate from massive damage, meaning that he’s fine. Though he didn’t know it, Ratatoskr seemed to, and it’s one of the reasons why he’s a good choice for interacting with these entities that can wreak such vast destruction.
So, we’ve acquired Tohka at this point. Tohka was a sorrowful, lonely Spirit whose only knowledge of the mortal world was in the midst of disasters. Brought down to the human level, she’s a bit of an airhead and mostly the vanilla deredere girlfriend of this harem. She still does clearly have some abandonment and loneliness issues, and puts a lot into Shido, meaning that she’ll be more relevant than average after her own arc. I give the show some credit that she maintains something of her own voice.
The next spirit is Yoshino, a significantly younger girl on the run, whose powers seem to be ice-related and who largely speaks through a literal hand puppet. Mercifully the show doesn’t go full lolicon, and most of Shido’s interactions with Yoshino are very brotherly in nature. Not that he doesn’t still win her affection and a kiss by the end, but I at least never felt like things were getting creepy.
Yoshino is a quiet one. Technically, her puppet is also her, and has an outspoken, even nasty persona, but it really does seem to be treated as a different character. She’s painfully shy and incredibly adorable, which helps everyone who meets her pretty much like her once she’s no longer a massive threat.
The next full arc introduces Kurumi – codename, Nightmare. You’ve probably seen a picture of her, because fanart and merch are everywhere. In her full spirit power form she does cut a striking image, what with her black and red frilly gothic dress, pistols, and glowing golden clock in place of one eye. She is, theoretically “the worst spirit”, with an absurd body count, but we see in the arc that introduces her that she pretty much goes after bullies, rapists, and the like… harvesting life energy for some goal she has in mind. With her powers giving her various and sundry control over time, including summoning an army of duplicates of herself from different points in her timeline, she does present a powerful presence as well.
She’s not one Ratatoskr is after, though – she’s after Shido, inclined to eat up the great power he’s been accumulating as the seal for multiple spirits, even if she doesn’t seem inclined to exactly take it by force. The two of them actually do have really good chemistry, especially when the chips are down. In the end, Shido actually doesn’t manage to seal her. No kiss, no end to her presence as a threatening third party. Instead, we save Shido’s biological little sister, who reappears in his life as an AST member hunting Kurumi down, and more or less let Kurumi go with the understanding that she’s not as bad as she seems.
Honestly, I see why Kurumi is such a popular character. Not only does she have a great look and theme, but she juxtaposes being the ultimate bad girl – both deadly and seductive – with the fact that her goals and motivation are actually more on the good side (she wants to gain the power to go back in time and off the original Spirit before all the disasters, negating the existence of the spirits and all the horrible things she’ll have done to get there) so you don’t have to feel bad liking or rooting for her most of the time. The fact she stays as an unsealed rogue also leads to her coming back in several later arcs for more focal time, beyond what any of the other girls tend to get once they’re sealed properly (except maybe Tohka)
The struggle with Kurumi, though, ended up revealing another spirit: Kotori herself is the flame spirit, Ifrit. She’s had her power sealed for years, but that seal came loose when she needed to kick ass, and now Shido has to date her. It’s… about as awkward as it sounds. To Shido, Kotori is his precious little sister, but Kotori’s feelings towards Shido – who recall she’s not actually related to – are clearly of a different character. This means she drags things out, insisting on a full date even though her emotional state would have been enough to get sealed right away. This is complicated somewhat by the fact that Origami blames Ifrit for the death of her parents, and on the spirit’s reappearance goes a little rogue in order to hunt it (which she doesn’t know is Kotori) down. She steals a next-gen mech suit and makes a mess of things, but Kotori gets sealed and Origami manages to be talked down and taken in (though somehow still not in on Shido’s secrets). Thus ends season 1 with a slightly bigger than normal struggle.
Season 2 features two Spirits. The first is actually two girls, a pair of twins named Kaguya and Yuzuru. They’re highly competitive and seem to hate each other, fighting for who gets to be the true spirit when the other one of them will have to cease to exist. They decide to use Shido for their hundredth battle, attempting to woo him, but before the critical point each of the sisters secretly asks that he pick the other, since they really do love each other and want their other half to live on. It’s not easy getting there, but the sealing of their powers by Shido provides a third option.
The twins are a little odd. One is basically competition for Origami in the flat affect department, the other is boisterous and energetic. They mellow out a good deal, like you’d expect, but they are later on still given a good deal of material related to their hang-ups and interpersonal issues as they come to terms with living as people.
The second spirit is Miku Izayoi, an idol singer. There are two notable issues with her. One, she absolutely hates men (later revealed to be due to trauma more than orientation, since spoiler alert she does eventually fall for Shido), forcing Shido to crossdress to interact with her, and maintain a multiple personality ruse for a bit. Second, her main power is mind control, which is always unfun to fight against. Shido ultimately manages to challenge her to a contest with her sealing as part of the stakes, but even when she loses despite cheating, Miku refuses to give it up, and instead just mind controls everybody but Shido against him.
With no one else to help Shido, Kurumi shows up. She’s pretty much the cavalry here, helping Shido convince Miku to join forces against an evil corporation that has made their move and kidnapped Tohka. She also helps deliver them to the corporation’s base, using her whole army of past and future selves to run interference. Shido and Miku actually talk, he learns her backstory, she decides he’s not evil, and they try to run to the rescue. However, when they get to Tohka, Shido is killed. He gets better, but not before Tohka utterly flips out, and in her rage and despair becomes a new kind of spirit called an Inverse.
Shido manages to reach Tohka and contain her, challenging her Inverse form and bringing regular Tohka back, while outside Kurumi (and Origami, who is helping) manage a bitter fight against the corporate wizards. To cap things off, Miku lets herself be sealed.
I still don’t like Miku. Once sealed and in the persona she’ll hold for the rest of the show, she’s outwardly sweet but still holds a lot of dark jealousy and possessiveness, which doesn’t play for comedy quite as well as the writers think. She’s not the worst character to ever get hit by the Harem Ray and join up, but her tragic backstory isn’t enough to make me approve of her.
Miku’s material was, essentially, two arcs: one facing off against her with crossdressing and a battle of the bands, the other dealing with kidnapped Tohka and the evil wizard corporation, but it feels more like one big marathon, meaning that it holds on to a lot of Season 2’s identity.
Season 3 once again concerns us with two spirits, but this in a more balanced two arcs. The first spirit is Natsumi, who has a witch vibe. She appears to be a busty woman, but her true form turns out to be a little kid, possibly even littler than Yoshino, about which she’s terribly self-conscious. In the meantime with that, Natsumi makes a jerk of herself by disappearing Shido’s friends one by one in a “Guess who I’m impersonating” game. After that’s done there’s another crisis, this one with a crashing satellite that the evil wizard corporation is involved with, and Natsumi helps save the day before letting herself get sealed.
Natsumi is a prankster and a brat with poor self image unsealed, and she’s about the same when sealed. Oddly, I don’t mind her; she gets a way with a good deal by how childish she is, and other than that her voice is nicely consistent across the end of her arc, unlike Miku.
The second arc of the season brings back Kurumi again and puts not another newcomer but a familiar girl in the limelight: Origami.
By this point, it’s been made clear that most if not all Spirits are humans who were granted core powers. Kotori is a perfect example, having not been Ifrit until the disaster five years before the present, and Kurumi has one in her tragic background as well (revealed in Season 4): she was tricked by a senior spirit into more or less becoming a magical girl, and fought by her side slaying mysterious monsters… only to learn those monsters were ordinary girls the senior spirit had seeded with cores, in order to improve the cores to the point where proper spirits could emerge. Even one of Kurumi’s closest friends was secretly a victim.
Origami here is approached by unknown forces and given the opportunity to gain Spirit power herself. With her burning need for revenge, she takes it. She also ends up cutting a deal with Kurumi, being sent five years into the past so she can defeat the responsible Spirit and save her parents.
However, Origami’s trip into the past turns out to be quite bad. She has an aerial dogfight with a spirit, and it turns out to be one of her own stray attacks that killed her parents in the past. Broken and insane with grief she snaps to the present, inverses, and begins to lay waste to absolutely everything.
With no way in the present to stop Origami, Shido once more needs Kurumi’s help. He goes five years into the past and struggles to set right what went wrong. Eventually, he manages, saving Origami’s parents from their spirit-related demise. He then finds himself back in the present… but a very different present. Only Shido and Kurumi remember the original timeline (which is a proof of concept for her plan to kill the Origin spirit).
Origami in particular is a very different person. Her parents still ended up dying before the present, but not in a way that caused her to close her heart, be consumed by revenge, and become the weird, pervy, flat-affect character we knew; she’s much more demure and seemingly sane. She still has a spirit’s power, though, that having transcended time, and so Shido has to try to connect with her. Echoes of the prime timeline bleed through, which ultimately include Origami’s brokenness and grief. When all the dust settles, Shido has brought her back to herself, something of a gestalt of the broken Prime Timeline Origami and her New Timeline self, supposedly being now capable of loving properly rather than of mere obsession.
Thus, we move on to season 4. It’s got three major arcs. The first centers on Nia, a manga artist Spirit who Shido has to try to woo. She’s the older love interest of the lot, and Shido’s attempts to try to be more like her Otome games don’t quite work, leading to a Manga competition between Team Shido and Nia. Ultimately, while Nia joins the team, a huge portion of her power is stolen by the evil Wizard corporation, meaning it’s not that critical if she’s “sealed” or not.
The second follows Mukuro, a very strange girl who has a conceptual key that she can use to “lock” and “unlock” things in a very abstract sense. Problematically, she’s locked off her heart, but undoing that (and rescuing her real body, in orbit, from the evil wizard corporation) is not the end of their woes as she immediately goes Yandere for Shido and tries to seal or destroy basically everything in the world that could come between the two of them. She’s an innocent monster, but she’s still kind of a monster, and only calms down a little once she’s sealed properly, accepting grudgingly the presence of the other girls and mostly staying this strange, alien presence for what little time the show has left.
Well, it’s then on to the last arc of the season… time to bring back Kurumi. Kurumi and Shido have a duel of trying to seduce the other party, so that either Shido will consent to being food for Kurumi’s power or Kurumi to being sealed and giving up on her goal. We get her tragic backstory here, and a very heavy arc where the two of them are being mercilessly hunted by the Evil Wizard Corporation. Kurumi uses her time powers to fight to keep Shido alive, dying herself and having to see him die countless times just to stretch his survival hours or minutes longer, without a clear way to handle the core problem. She even ends up playing Tsundere at herself, as her time-displaced selves force her core line to look more honestly at how she feels.
Date a Live has several times been heavier and more emotional than a show with such a goofy premise had any right to be. Tohka in particular had a good arc and strong character building even after being sealed, so that I never resented her being the clear lead for honest romance even if she was the most vanilla of the girls. Origami’s two selves and interface with her rage and grief ended season 3 with dynamite stuff. However, here in season 4, Kurumi really does take the cake. Dealing with her arc here, you can forget that you’re watching Date a Live, the show where teen romance tropes are supposed to save the world, since it’s operating more as an earnest and powerful urban fantasy drama. Even then, it’s also the chance to see Kurumi’s cute side as well as her exhaustion and determination playing a week over and over for north of two hundred loops to get something like a happy ending.
By the end, Shido is saved and the Evil Wizard Corporation attack halted, however temporarily. A mysterious Spirit we’ve been seeing around, Phantom, confronts Kurumi and is revealed to be one of the Ratatoskr staffers, while Shido resolves that he wants to save Kurumi from the seemingly endless cycle of sorrow she’s trapped in. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the note Season 4 goes out on.
So, obviously, there’s more story to Date a Live yet to come, which in some ways makes this review feel a little premature. In other ways… this thing has been going four seasons so I really do feel like I should be able to comment on it right now.
In my mind, the grade Date a Live gets is a B. It’s shockingly solid work for being this weird excuse plot leading into a harem. The girls, particularly Tohka, Origami, and Kurumi get a lot of work and have real pathos to them. The action, when it happens, is surprisingly legitimate. As the show goes on we see more of the sealed Spirits fighting with their powers lent back to them by Shido, and even Shido himself being able to wield some of the power he seals away. Sometimes, these things get lazy, at least in terms of the visual spectacle, but more often it looks good enough to pass muster, and they do know when they can’t afford to skimp on animation. A horde of Kurumi clones facing off against mooks? Yeah, you can pan across that. Shido fighting to reach the sad, agonized girl at the core of Inverse Origami? That needs animation and gets it. Or at least, without looking directly back at the scene, enough work in the writing and directing to convince me that it must have been awesome.
Date a Live is a buffet of harem comfort food, an absolute smorgasbord of girls so that there’s someone to watch for any taste you might have. But it has more intelligence and more plot than just being that. Out of all the harem schlock I’ve watched, it’s easy to see why Date a Live has four seasons and counting, and it stands as one that I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend.