Anime Review: True Tears
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
True Tears is a 2008 anime that is based on a Visual Novel of the same name. I can’t recall if I’ve talked about visual novels before but basically they’re video game-like digital literature. They’re not actually video games (mostly) but they tend to be “Choose Your Own Adventure” type of narratives with vastly different branching scenarios. Many, many of them are labeled as dating sims. A lot of those are also pornography. Yep. The closet example I can think of off-hand is the BlazBlue fighting game series as its story mode is in the visual novel style (but itself wouldn’t be considered one). The most infamous visual novel may be School Days which featured a bunch of endings that involved crazy-ass murders and soul crushing despair before getting an anime adaption that ran with that theme with horrific results. Visual novels are very popular in Japan, and a lot of anime are based on them, but they don’t really appear too much in America.
Weirdly True Tears apparently doesn’t have anything to do with the original visual novel except for the name; not the setting, not the plot, not the characters, not even the artwork. I’m not sure why this is but if I were to guess I’d say it might be because the anime studio didn’t want to make an show where fans essentially already know all the possible endings or perhaps the studio came up with its own original show but decided it would sell better if it had the same name of a popular visual novel. Regardless the show was produced by P.A. Works, Lantis, and Bandai Visual in 2008. Bandai Entertainment licensed and released it in North America later that year. A mundane, romance anime set in the real world with no fantastical elements? What could possibly go wrong?
Full review after the jump.
[WARNING: The review contains MASSIVE spoilers as I apparently didn't give a crap if I spoiled every detail of the show's ending. Read at your own risk.]
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