Title: White Album
Year: 2009
What is it about: School Days minus all the yandere.
My review: White Album is actually an adaptation of a visual novel, which is not and often not a good news. I was interested to check out this anime due to the fact that one of the characters, Ogata Rina (right), is voiced by Nana Mizuki and the other one, Morikawa Yuki (left), is voiced by Aya Hirano. I started listening to songs from White Album before I started watching the anime, and I found some of the best songs there.
And so, I started watching the first episode, and to be honest, I understand almost nothing from it. Fine, I thought, and I persevere to watch the second episode. Then things get a bit more interesting, but the fact remains that I could hardly understand the main storyline until I sought Wikipedia for help. Unfortunately, Wikipedia's synopsis for individual episodes stopped at episode 8. Coincidentally, it is from episode 8 onward that the storyline begins to fall apart.
First of all, please bear this in mind: this is quite the typical love story which you'll likely get from watching most melodramatic anime or drama series. See, this guy (Touya Fujii) has an incredibly beautiful girlfriend. See the girl on the left? She's pretty. So, for some reason this guy was separated from this girl for quite some time and then for some reason, they were not able to contact each other because they somehow are not aware of the existence mobile phones, one of the greatest inventions of mankind. So what does this guy do? He cheats on his girlfriend after being seduced by a lady much much older than him. Can you believe that? I mean, if I had a girlfriend as nice and pretty as her, the last thing I want is to lose her. Not only that, he also went for almost every other girl he sees throughout the series.
The one thing that pisses me off the most is the fact that a jerk like him eventually still gets the girl. He is also liked by a few others, and being a guy with overflowing hormones, he kinda made out with every single one of them. It was then that I realized something: This anime is exactly walking down the path of School Days. If you didn't know, School Days is about a sexually hyperactive guy who hits on every single girl he sees and was eventually brutally murdered by his girlfriend - yandere style.
I'd wish to say that some of the girls was able to avoid falling prey to Touya's sweet talk. It was pretty convincing at first to see how Touya was constantly being by several girls he tried to hit on. But alas, these girls eventually did submit to the temptation, including Ogata Rina who was protecting Yuki all the while from being played around by Touya. Seriously, what makes Touya so attractive that all girls just fall for him for no apparent reasons at all? That disappointed me very much and I stopped halfway through season 2 because I just couldn't take it anymore.
Well, to conclude, this anime is quite worth watching if you are able to ignore Touya's existence completely and focus more on the story of Yuki's rising stardom. The songs in this anime are definitely worth listening to. After all, it's Nana Mizuki and Aya Hirano who sang most of them.
Rating (out of 10): 4
