Last week when I took a look at the second season of Muv Luv Alternative I mentioned that there were certain other RomComs that left me baffled at the idea that we couldn’t get an adaptation of that story’s RomCom phase, Muv Luv Extra. Nisekoi is the hollow shell of a program I was alluding to most when I made that remark.
It is, honestly, baffling how this show doesn’t work given the degree to which it seems to have everything lined up in its favor. It has an interesting premise with a lot of potential for humor and/or drama (at least, that’s the case for one of the two major premises), its voice cast really give the show their all and represent some characters that at least should be extremely memorable, and it comes from studio Shaft, which has a deep well of creativity and style that helped bring Madoka Magica, Mekakucity Actors, and Bakemonogatari to life. Yet somehow, with all those stunning advantages, they managed to produce Nisekoi.
Perhaps one of the issues is that there are really two “cores” to the show. The first premise of Nisekoi: False Love (or just Nisekoi if you prefer, with the second season idiosyncratically indicated as “Nisekoi:”), the one that gives it the title, is that our main character, Raku Ichijou, is the son of a Yakuza leader – heir to all things Japanese gangster. A more multinational mafia moves into town, and though its leader and Raku’s father are actually old friends, that’s not enough to prevent the young bloods in either group from drumming up a turf war that could tear the city apart. What would be enough, however, would be if Raku and the Mafia leader’s daughter, who happens to be his age, were dating – neither the Yakuza nor mobsters would dare interfere with the affairs of the beloved heir to the throne, so as long as the two of them are an item, the guns stay firmly holstered.
The problem, however, is that Raku and the Mafia Heiress, Chitoge, have already met. And since that interaction started with her delivering an accidental flying kick to his head that made him lose something rather precious, it’s a case more or less of hate at first sight. Still, while the two of them can’t get along without a gun to their heads (in large part because Chitoge is the kind of abrasive that would evolve into Tsundere if and when there happened to be feelings under there, as of course happens eventually) there are, in fact, several metaphorical and possible literal guns to their heads if they don’t, so the ruse is on.
This is, in my mind, an extremely promising premise. It has a lot of baked in drama, which of course can be spun for humor when you push it far enough, which the show actually does. Chitoge dances happily on the line between being a funny sort of abrasive, and the kind of abrasive where the audience will hate her guts too, always bringing it back to the positive end by showing a critical moment of empathy when she needs to the most. Raku plays off her fairly well most of the time. True, he’s the sort of milquetoast domestic sweetheart of a male lead that we’ve come to expect to play against temperamental girls (despite actually being a gangster, rather than just looking like one like fellow archetype member Ryuji), but he can actually get sharp with Chitoge and stand up for himself when he needs to… at least if the plot doesn’t need him to not. More on that later.
The dynamic is rounded out by Kosaki Onodera, Raku’s somewhat timid but incredibly kind classmate, on whom he has an actual crush, and who also has a crush on him, though neither knows the other is interested. Raku wants to be with Onodera, but the fact that he has to constantly fake like he’s with Chitoge makes communicating this to her very difficult. At the same time, Chitoge actually hits it off with Onodera and the two become friends, which means that whether he likes it or not Raku will often have to deal with both his real crush and his fake girlfriend, desperately juggling his every word so as to neither lose his chance with Onodera nor draw the ire of Chitoge’s highly suspicious and ever watchful bodyguard, Claude.
In my mind, when these are the pieces Nisekoi is playing with and when it’s actually utilizing the whole “crazy gangsters mean you two have to make like you’re together” element well, the show is at its funniest and most effective. Sadly, it does that very seldom, and it never really leverages the element to its fullest potential.
The second core of Nisekoi is centered around that precious item Chitoge causes Raku to lose (temporarily. In one of her soft moments, she actually helps him search for it and gets it back, not that she lets him know she was legitimately trying) in their first meeting. The item in question is a large and ornate locket, complete with actual door-style lock. Raku has the locket, and with it vague memories of a girl he knew as a little kid. They promised to be with each other forever and meet again some day, with Raku keeping the locket and the girl the key, so that they would know each other no matter how much time had passed or how much either had changed.
For as important as the locket and the girl with the key are to Raku, though, his memories of her and their time together sure are unspecific and shoddy – he has no idea what she looked like, what her name might have been, or anything like that. I guess the idea was that they were quite young and you don’t tend to keep clear views of your early memories, but they were clearly old enough kids to have some degree of agency and do things, and if you’re constantly dwelling on memories then they should be reinforced as facts in your mind. Heck, I’m in my thirties, if I can remember the name and more or less appearance of my crush from grade school despite not thinking about that sort of thing very often, what’s Raku’s excuse?
In Muv Luv Extra (to bring this back to a much better story) there’s a similar setup where main character Takeru has some important memories about a girl he met as a really little kid. Except there, it makes sense that he doesn’t have his facts straight, because he doesn’t think about it all the time, because in a rather realistic (rather than unrealistic) case of faulty memory he transferred the other person in the scene to being his childhood friend who has been with him since back then and who he sees constantly, and because the girl in question was probably under an at least somewhat different name back then if he even caught her name, which he might not have. It’s a marvel he retained anything useful at all, and it makes sense that he doesn’t put things together, even if the viewer has a lot of clues fairly early. Here, Raku dreams and daydreams about mystery little girl so much, and it’s strongly implied that he’s done so for some time since he wears the locket everywhere he goes, so he should have a much clearer picture of the truth. If at the start of the show he had just found the locket in a cache of old stuff and barely managed to recall that it was significant, I would excuse him, but that’s not the case.
But let’s set aside for a moment the fact that Raku not having a good easy answer is stupid, or at least only reference it in parenthetical notes, and instead focus on the other ways this mess doesn’t work as the backbone the show uses most. It turns out, you see, that Onodera (who Raku has known continuously for a few years at least and thus should remember better) has a key that looks like it goes to Raku’s lock, and a some memories that painfully obviously line up with Raku’s. Mystery solved, right? Wrong. Chitoge (a blonde girl in Japan, who is constantly acknowledged as being strikingly recognizable), you see, also has a special key, and since their fathers are friends it’s fairly easily confirmed that they did know each other and play together when they were really little. As if that wasn’t contrived enough, the latter half of the first season introduces a third girl with a key, the sickly and low-key yandere daughter of the Chief of Police (another place where they should have gotten a lot more mileage out of everyone’s family and social status), Marika Tachibana. She clearly remembers Raku (like he should remember Locket Girl), so her hat is firmly in the ring too.
Problem one (or far more than one if you’re really counting), once this is all out in the open, where it gets surprisingly quickly for this show, there is literally no reason to not disambiguate it. It’s not like it takes a lot of effort to try a key in a lock. Sometimes when it’s dark I have to do that a couple times just to get in my house. One of these three girls almost certainly has the right key – or maybe they all do! They never do get around to opening the dang locket. To be fair, when one key (Chitoge’s) actually is tried it breaks in the stupid lock and jams it, but it takes forever and many, many near misses to even get that far, and the broken key is nothing someone with a little tinkering skill can’t eventually solve.
Problem two (or x+2)… what does it matter? Okay, Locket Girl is Raku’s literal dream girl. A dream girl whose name, face, and attributes he has forgotten entirely, in favor of mostly being head over heels for Onodera. It’s not as though Raku’s relationship woes in the present are uncomplicated: he’s forced to fake-date Chitoge, which interferes with the mutual attraction with Onodera, and Marika is kind of psychotically head-over-heels for him with a powerful enough daddy to maybe back it up at that. “Which girl has the correct key?” is, at most, a curiosity at this point. One that I totally accept Raku wanting the answer to, and that might result in him seeing someone in a somewhat new light, but that isn’t exactly a mystical be-all end-all. Promises between tiny little kids are anything but binding, and I don’t think if the answer were to be “not Chitoge” the rusty old locket of true love would mean squat to a bunch of hardened gangsters.
But they go on and on about the locket, give Raku these draggy inner monologues where he wonders what the answer might be or what he wants the answer to be, and always stops short of addressing it. There’s a scene partway through season one where Raku and Onodera actually talk about the topic, they identify each other as probably the kid from the past, she has the key, he has the lock, and they seem all ready to try it… and then there’s a minor interruption and they both totally lose their nerve and never get back to that conversation.
When reviewing DearS, another and quite differently terrible RomCom, I said something like this –
There’s a distinct difference between “This could have been avoided if the characters were prescient about what information needed to be shared and did so without regard to other factors”, “This could have been avoided if the characters talked things over like adults”, and “This could have been avoided if, one time out of many possible times, someone finished their sentence.”
Like DearS, Nisekoi lands far, far too often in the latter of the three categories. This is especially grating, downright infuriating, not because of how near the misses are and how total the resets are once the near miss moment has passed, but because so little other stuff is going on in this show.
In my mind, that bit is the biggest single problem with Nisekoi: it’s a show where nothing of value really happens. Well, to be fair, things do happen, but the pacing is absolutely glacial, both in terms of the show as a whole and all to often in terms of individual episodes. Scenes go on with long closeups and long inner monologues that repeat things the viewers already know and the characters have said before without really adding any value. In terms of the show’s full run, Nisekoi’s two seasons contain, in total, 32 episodes – 20 episodes in season 1 and 12 in season 2 – which is enough for even most bigger stories to say everything they feel they need to say.
32 episodes with Raku, Chitoge, Onodera, Marika eventually, and the also-rans (I’ll get to them), mostly just trying to get their interpersonal relationships in order, is longer than we spend with Ryuji, Taiga, Minorin, and the rest of their gang. It’s longer than Oreki spends falling for Chitanda or Mayaka and Satoshi dance around their obvious issues while solving mysteries in Hyouka. It’s longer than Shirou Emiya gets to know Rin Tohsaka in Unlimited Blade Works and turn her tsun into dere, and they have to fight legendary heroes of old while building their chemistry. It’s longer than it takes Mirai Nikki to move Yuno Gasai from insane stalker to… okay, still insane stalker, but one who can share a beautifully screwed-up yet still mutual love with her mark Yukiteru, scrubbing ten other diary-holders along the way – most of which got fair amounts of character development as well.
32 episodes of anime is very nearly thirteen real-world hours – without commercials or any breaks, mind you – during which we would expect Nisekoi to develop characters, move relationships, and tell a story that’s worth our time. It does not. The void of interest and focus is why, contrary to my usual style where I spend most of my review summarizing the plot in a linear manner with commentary salted throughout, I’ve been going more extemporaneous, and just commenting on the show’s broken core. Since I’ve been comparing this to Extra a great deal, I have 60 hours logged in Muv Luv, but since I 100%ed the game, that 60 hours represents five playthroughs of Extra and a few more of Unlimited. Even assuming later ones didn’t take as long for various reasons, I think it’s fair to say that in the running time of Nisekoi I could have done a single playthrough of Extra at a comfortable pace with time to spare, and I would have enjoyed it a lot more.
I’ve pointed out in the past that it takes time and scenes to build and evolve the chemistry between characters, but more time is not more better, especially not when you don’t use it well. Some dynamics can be understood and experienced quite quickly, some take longer, and none of them need this kind of constant retreading.
And Nisekoi is not a “status quo is god” sort of affair. Things do change over time. Status quo is here at best a cruel demiurge, an unnatural force that desperately claws back at our characters, that steals Onodera’s voice or Raku’s spine or Chitoge’s fire at the exact moment where it matters, bitterly grinding down any sort of progress without having the absolute power to stop it entirely. Actually, I think I’d be happier with the show if it were a 100% status-quo, since then at least it would refocus on the slapstick comedy that Shaft is really good at animating when they aren’t obsessively adding details and shines to the backgrounds to alleviate their boredom with the rest of the show.
Instead, it is a tale told by an Ent, content rolling out so slowly as to have its motion be nearly imperceptible. Or, to make a different Lord of the Rings reference, the story is thin, stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread. It has to cover so much space that what was good about is lost, and all we can see is a disappointing approximation of what should have been.
Some of that space is filled with a couple of characters I’d call the “also-rans”, a pair of girls who end up as clear romantic rivals, but who aren’t part of the whole locket game and thus who really don’t have a leg to stand on in terms of how the story is structured.
The first of these, introduced before Marika, is Tsugumi. Initially, Tsugumi is believed to be a boy – specifically a henchman working for Claude, who intends to either expose the fakery of Chitoge and Raku’s relationship or else to break them up. At first it looks like Tsugumi (again, assumed to be a boy) is trying to woo Chitoge, and the two of them do have a history where they evidently spent a lot of time together. Eventually, Tsugumi faces Raku in a gang-style challenge, but the situation ends up such that Tsugumi’s femininity is revealed to Raku (typical hijinx), which forces Tsugumi to turn over a new leaf, especially as Chitoge tries to help her friend learn to be a properly cute high school girl. The encounter, and more after, throw Tsugumi off her game as she clearly develops feelings for Raku, but doesn’t even understand herself enough to get that for quite some time.
Tsugumi, I will say, is fairly funny. She turns out some good scenes, and episodes focused on her tend to be heavy on the slapstick and even sometimes dip toes into action because of how hypercompetent Tsugumi is at being a hitwoman (Claude, evidently even more confused than Raku, never does catch on that his hitman is in fact a hitwoman, even when she starts letting her rather impressive rack show in her outline. It’s a funny joke!). This makes Tsugumi’s episodes reliably the best in the show, even if I think that taking the show down to its frame would mean probably letting her and the other also-ran drop.
For that second also-ran, we have to move to Season 2. When I first watched Nisekoi, I held hope that season 2 would be better paced than Season 1. After all, season 1 was a weird 20 episodes, so I thought maybe, just maybe, it had been padded out and a 12-episode outing would trim the fat. Instead, they went and introduced Onodera’s obnoxious little sister, Haru. Unlike Tsugumi, who is the most consistently entertaining character in the show even if she’s got no right being there, this brat-and-a-half is a shrill little agent of stasis who exists for no other reason than to drag things out, particularly by cockblocking Onodera and Raku from each other.
Haru’s gimmick is that, in her introduction in season 2, the cute little girl is menaced by some bad men. Someone (from her perspective) comes in to save her, her perfect prince with whom she immediately falls in love. She doesn’t get to see his face clearly, though, since she faints dead away from the mental stress of being as close to assaulted as a silly show like Nisekoi is willing to go, but she does manage to acquire a trinket from her prince… the Haruhi-damned locket that Raku really should have learned to take better care of than to let it literally fall into the hands of this twerp.
Yeah, surprising no one, he’s Haru’s prince. Oh, but she doesn’t know it. When they meet properly and the wind catches her skirt giving him a view of her panties (not like he had any control of it) she decides that Raku is an evil pervert who must be kept from poor naive big sis at all costs, which she continues to persecute. This keeps going even when everyone Haru knows confirms that the locket she’s holding onto is quite unique and absolutely belongs to Raku. She’s eventually pressured into giving it back, but pulls the card where she’s only letting him hold onto it until her real prince, who can’t possibly be him, comes back around. Raku actually does a lot of hard work trying to get Haru to accept him – after all, in his ideal world (barring any building slow-burn feelings for Chitoge that are more than friendly), she’d be his sister-in-law eventually – but there’s always either Haru’s own extremely abrasive nature or some ridiculous contrived panties-exposing coincidence to circle us back to her hating Raku, at best slightly less than before, and waiting for her Prince who is absolutely not Raku.
Keep waiting, you gremlin. Not only is Haru Onodera a pointless obstacle to capstone a show that’s been nothing but pointless and nonsensical obstacles to answering a question that doesn’t really need to be answered to have a good show since “we met as babies” is a weak silver bullet for romance compared to actual chemistry (you can have both, and that’s nice, but one is clearly more important), she’s just a pain to watch. Her bit isn’t funny, she’s not charming or personable like Chitoge can be, and her scenes are just downright unpleasant more often than not in both their setups and their payoffs.
While Tsugumi and Haru are about as opposite as you can get in terms of characters, at least when considering my esteem for them, they together represent some of the unpleasant bloat that Nisekoi experiences. Tsugumi is fun, so she can be forgiven more, but she’s still technically wasting time with which we should be progressing (not dithering on) the central love quadrangle. Haru is just plain awful.
In terms of things that aren’t awful, though, I do have to give credit where it is due, there are a few good episodes of Nisekoi even aside from the Tsugumi episodes. In one arc, Chitoge’s mother comes to town for Christmas. She’s an insanely wealthy, influential, and high-maintenance businesswoman perhaps uncomfortably reminiscent of Ragyo Kiryuin in her global glamour and general disregard for her daughter. Of course this is Nisekoi, so she’s not that bad at heart, but Chitoge evidently usually only sees her around the holidays, and is quite attached to those little slices of time she has with her mom. Her mother works Raku to the bone as her assistant for her visit, and does work all the time during it rather than being with her family. Raku steps up so she’ll find enough time to be with Chitoge at least a little, overperforming in his role for that end, only to be rewarded with a private hotel room with Chitoge where mom will not be coming. Raku manages to, after days of taking her crap, tell mom off in the right way so that busy as hell or not she gets the picture that what her daughter really wants for Christmas is mom, and has to legitimately struggle to give them a chance to really be together, even for a moment, which looks like it’s lost several times along the way.
This sequence stands out because it’s not too long, something is always happening, and we’re really exploring the psyche and needs of one of our main characters. It’s where we get to see Chitoge soft and vulnerable, where we get that she is an ordinary girl who needs her mother and not just a tsundere gorilla, and it’s where we see that even if Raku doesn’t love Chitoge in a romantic sense (which is, frankly, up in the air as the show progresses) he does care about her and want her to be happy; he’s not just doing his minimum as fake boyfriend. If every arc in Nisekoi had this kind of conflict and this kind of growth, it wouldn’t just have been passable, it would have been a very good show. Alas, the “Chitoge’s Mom” arc is a complete fluke, not at all representative of the morass of the show as a whole.
The other episode I want to call out for the main cast is, oddly enough, another strangely mom-oriented one. This one occurs during summer, when Onodera invites Raku to spend a day helping out at her family’s bakery. He meets her mom, who is a wild and quite funny character, and who becomes a Raku-Onodera shipper after she tastes his cooking (something that it was already canonically established that he’s good at, while Onodera herself is actually quite poor despite loving it). The two kids end up tending the shop (which is attached to Onodera’s house) alone, we get the RomCom interplay of Onodera trying to not embarrass herself when Raku has every reason to see her room, Haru is thank Haruhi not a thing yet in the show, and we even get some really great romantic sparks and tension when it seems like a Typhoon is going to have the two of them stuck indoors, home alone. Of course, we can’t have Onodera making too much progress so the rain breaks well before anything happens and Raku (much to his chagrin) is able to go home, but it was still a somewhat funny and quite sweet little episode.
Nisekoi is a hard one. I can pick out so many things I like. I enjoy the characters (except Haru) a great deal. I love the visuals – Shaft really does a great job with them, so that even all the dead air padding out the show is at least entertaining to look at. It has that insanely catchy whistle theme from the first set of end cards. There are quite a few jokes, scenes, and even some episodes that do legitimately work… but it’s trapped in a morass of uninteresting thoughts with more repetition in total than The Endless Eight. But where that was a fascinating creative choice that just happened to be sanity-damaging for viewers, Nisekoi is just plain boring.
So, in the end, what’s the grade? I can’t recommend the show, not at all, but I can recommend so many components that it can’t just be an outright fail. It came close not just to quality but to greatness and yet landed in a miasmic pit of tedium and annoyance.
For all that, I’m going to go with D+. I respect the things it did well, and I still hold a high opinion of Shaft that’s not dimmed by them turning this sucker out, but I have to say… don’t waste your time with Nisekoi. While it doesn’t have literally nothing to offer, it also doesn’t have nearly enough.