Shuffle!

Information of Anime

In the past, two doors were found in an ancient ruin.  These door lead to shinkai, the realm of the shinzoku (world of Gods) & makai, the realm of the mazoku (world of demons).  When these doors were opened, Earth became an inhabitant for the races of human, shinzoku, & mazoku.  Together, they all lived peacefully.

In the present (ten years later), Rin Tsuchimi, a normal human high school student, is staying with Kaede Fuyou, a friend who treats her like his sister.  He started living with her after his parents pasted away.  One day at school, two new students, one from shinzoku & one from makai, transferred into Rin's class & immediately fell in love with him.  Their names are Lisianthus (aka Sia), a daughter of the King of God, & Nerine, a daughter of the King of Demons.  It turns out they knew Rin from their childhood years & fell him in love with him in then.  Rin, unknowingly, becomes a groom candidate to one of the two girls automatically.  What's worse, the two royal families live next door to him now.  What will become of Rin's life now?

Storyline (CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Below is a summary of the storyline I have seen.  This section does contain some spoilers.  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 the relationship between Rin & the girls.  Two other girls who interact with Rin are Asa Shigure & Primula.  So, the series is basically a harem anime for Rin.  The show covers the relationship between Rin & one girl in arcs.  The beginning of the show contains a lot of humour.  Most of these comedic scenes involve Rin getting chased by three fanclubs of Kaede, Lisianthus, & Nerine.

Afterwards, the show starts to go into arcs for each of the five main girls & gets a bit serious with less jokes involved.  The first arc involves Primula getting ill which could cause her to die.  The demon king & god tries to convince Rin to sent Primula back & he finally agrees when he learns about the dangers.  Because she's a being created by the demon king & god for using the most of their potential magic, Primula is seal in a chamber with some sort of liquid to preserve her body.  From here, we learn about Nerine's past which would lead the viewers to the next arc as Primula makes to wake up from her coma & become healthy again by Rin's encouragement.

In Nerine's arc, we learn that the girl that Rin met when he was a child wasn't Nerine at all.  It was Nerine's clone, which was made to make use of the most of the magic of demons & gods; just like Primula.  The clone's name is Licorice.  Because Licorice is made from Nerine's body, she becomes weak when she was young.  As Nerine was on the verge of death, Licorice agrees to sacrifice herself by returning to Nerine's body in order to save her.  Because she is reunited with Nerine again, Nerine gains all of Licorice's character & personality within her.  She tells Rin that "her love" for him is really Licorice's dream, not her's.  Knowing that Rin would reject her, Nerine tells him that she will do everything she can to love him more & more.

In Lisianthus' arc, we finally see Lisianthus' other personality that appears in the mirror at times from the early episodes.  This other personality tells Lisianthus that she isn't trying hard enough to get Rin to love her.  She can tell since she is in Lisianthus's heart.  Because Lisianthus' is happy with Rin not loving her but liking everyone else, her second personality takes over her.  This new Lisianthus becomes very aggressive in getting Rin to love her by going on a date for the whole day while skipping school.  Because Rin is concern of Lisianthus' personality, he refuses to kiss her when she tries to kiss him.  Finally, Lisianthus regains herself when she goes home to her room & defeats her second personality's existence.  The second surrenders as she agrees to leave her as she accomplish her wish in make Lisianthus happy & realizing that she was pushing her too hard.  The next day, Lisianthus tells Rin about her strange behaviour the other day.  It turns out that the second personality is actually Lisianthus' twin sister, Kikyou, who had died from birth.  Kikyou merged with Lisianthus, in terms of soul, in order to be together.  When Lisianthus confesses her love to Rin, he turns her down.  But she is happy as it is because of his honestly.

Next is Kaede's arc & it is quite long in terms of details.  From the past three arcs, we have seen Rin & Asa getting close together little by little.  This bothers Kaede each day as Rin doesn't listen to her much & spends a lot of time with Asa.  In the arc, we see a flashback from eight years ago as Kaede tells Rin that he deserves to die.  The story shows us more about their childhood past to determine why she wants him dead.  When Kaede's mother died, she had a major trauma which caused her to go to the hospital.   Because he wanted her to wake up, Rin goes to Kaede & tells her that he killed her mother by phoning her & telling her that he felt lonely, causing Kaede's mother to turn back & die in a car accident.  Because she hears this, Kaede starts to hate Rin & makes attempts to hurt him to the point where he could die.  She does this behind everyone's back.  Rin doesn't make any attempts to tell on her.  This continues on until their early high school years as Kaede finally learns the truth.  From a postcard she found in Rin's room, she learned that Kaede was very sick when she was young & how her mother would rush over to her ASAP to see her condition.  It turns out that Rin lied to Kaede about killing her mother, when it was Kaede's fault.  This incident is where Kaede has a change of heart & begins to take care of Rin until now.  As Rin pays a lot of attention to Asa, Kaede starts to lose it.  When Rin takes Asa to their home, Kaede tells her to left while hurting her.  Rin breaks them up & Kaede tells Asa that she deserves to die.  Hearing what she said, Kaede couldn't believe what she had done.  Meanwhile, Asa is suffering from a heart attack like problem & loses consciousness.

Rin spends most of his time visiting Asa in the hospital as Kaede continues with her emotional breakdown.  One night, Kaede goes into Rin's bed naked & tells him to stay with her forever.  This cause Rin to run away & clear up his head about what he should do.  When he comes home, he tells Kaede that he will leave home; shocking Kaede & Primula who is watching from a distance.  The reason is because Rin felt that he told away most of Kaede's life by having her take care of him since that day she discovered the truth.  With that, Kaede accepts the fact that Rin gave her & asks Asa to take care of him from now on. 

The show moves on with Rin, with Asa's help, moving into his apartment.  Some of his friends help as well.  We also see the bond between Rin & Asa getting stronger.  After the moving task is completed & both are getting some rest, Asa suddenly collapes when Rin tries to kiss her.  We now enter deeper in Asa's arc.

Asa is in critical condition as she rests in bed in the hospital.  Doctors don't know what the symptom is & can't find a cure for it.  Ama, Asa' mother, appears & takes Rin outside to talk to him.  After determining that Rin loves Asa, Ama reveals the truth to him by removing her hat.  Ama is a demon that underwent the Yggsdrail Project.  She was the first demon to take that experiment.  Even though she knew it was very risky, she become a test subject for it since she believes that she had nothing to live for.  The result teleported her to the human world, where the humans didn't know the existence of demons.  A man saved her when he found her & become Ama's husband.  However, Asa is a human.  Her body is a container that holds devil powers.  Right now, her body can't hold it anymore, which causes her to suffer.  Asa knew her mother was demon when Ama showed her the truth & broke down in crying as she apologized to her when she was little.  Ama asks Rin to help save Asa by having her use magic.

Rin makes many attempts to have Asa use magic by asking her, but she refuses.  She knows that it can save her, but she doesn't want to do it because of the suffering her mom had.  One night while Rin continues to think what he can do, Asa runs away from the hospital.  Rin finds her at the top of the hill where he made his confession to her.  After making one more final attempt to see if Asa will use magic or not, he deeply cuts his wrist with a knife.  He does it because he fits he wasn't good enough to save Asa.  In order to save Rin from dying, she uses magic.

The show ends three days after the incident as we look at the lives of the girls.  All of them still love Rin & will continue to try to get him as their boyfriend.

My Personal Review

Shuffle! is originally an ero-game by Navel.  This would explain the harem theme.  Plus, the show does have nudity of the girls' chests in detail.  Personally, I think the show is interesting to watch with it's comedy & currently drama elements.  If you like D.C. & don't mind seeing nipples, I recommend watching Shuffle!

Animation

The character designs look like the same ones from the game, which is a good thing.  They are cute & well drawn.  However, I felt the girls' faces are very similar to each other.  Later on in show, detail nudity (nipples) starts to appear.  In the last episode, the drawings really start to slack off.  The faces get flat.  The characters almost don't look like what they were in the previous episodes & the body proportions when looking at them from a distance are really ugly.

The colours are pretty dull & is easy on the eyes.  It matches well the city's buildings & the nature sceneries.

The animation movement was pretty silly at the beginning with bodies flying around the place when Rin gets chased by the fanclubs.  Afterwards, it began to use realistic natural movements.  So natural, you can really enjoy all those ecchi scenes.

Sound       

The sound effects are quite soft & quiet for some reason.  Even parts where loud banging & hitting are involved sounded soft.  I'm assume the writers didn't want to go wild on them since it looks like they want to make Shuffle! like a live action romantic drama.

The voice actors of the girls didn't sound good to me.  Nerine sounded like she had a sore throat & Lisianthus' voice is harsh even though she tries to some cute.  They irradiated me a bit.  What's more bad are the voices of Asa & her mother.  Her mother sounded much younger than Asa.  It almost makes her like a little sister to Asa.

The music is mainly soft ballads in the show.  There are some quick paced ones & they fitted the show well.  Although they were nice, I didn't enjoy them much.  Probably because they were too light for me.  The opening & ending theme songs are enjoyable.

Story

The storyline is well written in terms of how the arcs flow with one another very smoothly.  There are elements shown early in the show would be used in later arcs, such as Lisianthus's other personality & Asa's health problems.  Although a lot of the arcs involve relationships with Rin, it is well planned out.  There's some comedy & a lot of tragic moments for some of the girls.  In their arcs, it's mainly involves a lot of psychological problems.  But what anime these days doesn't have psychological problems anyways?  But there are quite deep & is well suited for a mature audience.

I liked how the show changes it intermission & title animations to fit the seriousness & happy comedy plots of each episodes.  They really help maintain the mood.

The ending was quite a surprise to me.  The girl that Rin chooses wasn't someone I expected.  I understand that the game has different paths to get the girls, but I didn't think it would have been "her".  But I think the reason is based on how the game uses "her" storyline.  The problem doesn't occur until Rin chooses "her".  Since I haven't played the game, this is only based on assumption.  Overall, I felt the show did a nice job filling in all the loose ends & seem fitting.

Overall Conclusion

Shuffle! is actually a nice anime series to watch.  It's got a nice balance of comedy & love drama for a harem anime & doesn't go over the top a lot.  The girl that Rin chooses was a surprise to me, but not a shocker.  If you like light comedy love anime with a deep storylines, I highly recommend this series.

Shuffle! gets a nine out of ten from me. It's got a good combination of love drama & comedy.  Plus, nice deep storylines for each girl's arc.  Problem with the show is how far these problems the girls have go.  It's very dark & on a psycho level almost.  Also, the source of the problems look like they are the same with the other girls; especially Lisianthus & Nerine.

Personally, I recommend this on your "must watch anime" list.

Last updated on January 16, 2008