Kimikiss pure rogue

Information of Anime

Kouichi Sanada & Kazuki Aihara's childhood friend Mao Mizusawa returns from France & is living at Kouichi's house.  The three of them are attending the same school together & are at the point where they are starting relationships with the opposite genders.

Storyline (CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Below is a summary of the storyline I've seen.  If you haven't seen the series yet & don't want to be spoiled, skip this section.  If you want to know the story & want to see how I viewed it, read on.

The show focuses on three relationships of Kouichi, Kazuki, & Mao.  Kouichi is paired up with Yumi Hoshino, Kazuki with Eriko Futami, & Mao with Eiji Kai.  Each of them kind of supports each other in building the relationship with some mixed results at times.  Kouichi's is building, Mao's is unsure, & Kazuki's is running up a brick wall.  All this occurs as Akira Hiiragi is forcefully making a film for the school's film club as he is the club president.  Although Kouichi & Mao have their own relationships, Mao seems to view Kouichi differently as close as a lover than brother & sister.  Plus, she starts to feel uncomfortable about Kouichi & Hoshino getting close & kissing.  Worse is where she replaces Hoshino as the main female character for Akira Hiiragi's school movie club movie with Kouichi as the leading male actor.  However, Hoshino is transferring to a new school at the end of summer & wants to spend most of her time with Kouichi.

The other love story starts to build into a love triangle as well between Kazuki, Futami, & Asuka Sakino.  Kazuki's love for Futami is from her experiments that she performed on him about why people love for a long period of time.  Seeing how Kazuki is stuck by it & bothered by Futami's emotionless experiments, Sakino tells her how Kazuki feels for her.  Futami tries to end it by telling Kazuki that the experiments have ended & that he should not contact her anymore.  From the other love relationship, Mao tells Kai that they should break up as she has developed feelings for Kouichi beyond from being a little brother.

Things get problematic as the two love stories are breaking apart.  Mao tells Kouichi out of rage that she loves him & he starts to get spaced out a lot to the point that Hoshino is worried.  Kazuki tries to forget about Futami & move on until Asuka tries to get the two back together again.  From there, he finally confesses his love for her.  Slowly, it works out well.  However, the other side has Mao moving out which puts Kouichi in a state of shock as he wants to go back to how things were in the past.  Going back to Kazuki, Asuka starts to get depressed as she questions herself in why she got Kazuki & Futami back together.

After Mao has moved out, she has started to move on & now plans to go to university to be a French interpreter.  Although she manages to distance herself from Kouichi, he is still feels down about the situation of her moving out.  So much that Hoshino is concerned.

After the soccer match, both Kazuki & Kouchi have some troubles but manage to solve them before the end of the show.  Kouchi finally becomes honest with himself & breaks up with Hoshino who had no problems with it.  From there, he searches for Mao & finally confesses to her as she does the same to him.  For Kazuki, he manages to find Futami when she ran away from the school due to fear of being with him.  Thanks to Asuka who found her & gives her some encouragement, Futami's experiment which was trying to push away from others & being alone failed.  As a result, she & Kazuki confess their love for each other.

A special episode was made only for DVD & it focuses on the minor character Kuryuu Megumi.  Her story is about finding out love is about.  She examines other couples & looks for her ideal guy.  The story takes place in the middle of the TV show as most of the couples aren't "official" yet.  In the end, Kuryuu finds out to be herself & will take her time finding the right person.

My Personal Review

Kimikiss pure rogue is somewhat different than what I expected.  I picked this up since it was based on a dating sim game.

Animation

The character designs are quite plain.  The female characters are simple & all look alike with pretty much the same face build with little facial differences.  But they look pretty much the same with all other female characters. Even the male characters are similar looking with others as well.

The backgrounds are okay.  Not a lot of details, but it's got a soft feel in them because of the soft dull colours.

The colours are on the soft dull side.  Even with the bright & bold parts, it's still dull.  It kind of makes the show look a bit old as if it came from the 90s & more plain with its character designs.

In terms of the animation movement, it's mainly on the realistic side.  Sometimes the movements are realistic & sometimes the movements are not normal.  But they are quite smooth with some choppy frames found.  Mainly the running parts & slow movements.

Sound

The sound effects are on the silly & realistic side.  Some of them are quite cute & funny.  They fit the show well & give it some life to the easy mood settings.

The seiyuus here are average. Not a lot of them make a huge impact, but the cast lineup is a good set.  It's probably because I'm not use to some of them being in a light hearted love comedy. 

The music is mainly the pop & ballad side with some rock & jazz.  Quite nice & pleasant.  None of them are memorable though.  They escape from my head pretty easily.

Story

Mainly three childhood friends getting into love relationship for the first time.  The relationships are different from one another in terms of situations.  It gives a nice mix to the show & they are well-balanced.  However, it can be dry & slow for some as the progress in building them isn't stable.  The show jumps to different relationships a lot & just leaves enough to get a good taste of them.

Because of the relationships, character development is critical in terms of the characters going steady or breaking up.  The show somewhat does a good job in this area as some characters like Kazuki & Riji are making bold moves to get their relationships going.  Interesting enough, both relationships have a triangle involved with different result appearing for the two.

As for ending, it's nicely done.  Despite having two different love triangles, it manages to wrap up nicely without leaving plot holes or incomplete situations behind.  Everything is resolved & everyone manages to move on at a fairly good pace.

Overall Conclusion

Kimikiss pure rogue is a nice light comedy show.  It steers clear from today's harem anime world & has multiple relationships that the viewers can focus on.  Personally, I would recommend this show if you like something light & a change of pace.

Kimikiss pure rogue gets a 7.5/10.  The show displays the relationships well & balances them out nicely without leaving a lot of holes in them.  Because of this, the ending is complete & balanced.  However, it can be dry to many as it takes a bit of a more serious approach than using jokes to tell the storylines.

Last updated on September 15, 2008