Tsuyokiss: Cool X Sweet

Information of Anime

Sunao Konoe, who is making a future in acting, enters a new school only to find out there is no theatre club there.  In an attempt to make one, the school council president, Erika Kiriya, rejects the idea due to a lack of interest.  Sunao doesn't give up & makes every attempt to build a theatre club in the school.

Tsuyokiss: Cool X Sweet is based on an eroge, but doesn't follow the game's storyline.

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.

Sunao makes a lot of attempts despite Erika's rejections to the idea of creating a theatre club.    Sunao does a lot of promoting using her acting skills to perform plays in school activities that are occurring during the year.  She gains a lot of support from her fellow schoolmates &, slowly, members of the student council.  Within the student council is a male student named Leo Tsushima, who was Sunao's childhood friend from their elementary school days.  In the shadows, he tries to support Sunao's idea & dreams as he has a crush on her & likewise for Sunao.

Things pick up as the school festival approaches & Leo & Sunao seem to have spent a lot of time together in the past few days.  However, Sunao feels crushed when she sees Leo & Otome Kurogane, a senior girl at their school that likes Sunao's performances, walking together in a very friendly manner.  This leads to a conclusion for Sunao to believe that the two are going out together when she discovers that Otome has been living with Leo & taking care of him since he was a child.  As a result, her play at the school festival was poor as her mind lost concentration during her performance.

Time passes after the play incident & Sunao is still feeling down after seeing Leo & Otome together in the audience during her play.  Sunao doesn't attend school as she realizes that she was acting for Leo.  Meanwhile, the school is trying to find a new student council president for the next year.  It was only Sunao's acting ability that manage to defeat Erika for the position by using her acting skills to perform all the hardships she suffered when she first entered the school.  It was Leo's help that manage to get Sunao back to school after everyone was worried about her.

The show ends with Sunao finally giving Leo the love letter that she failed to send to him back in elementary school.  Just as they get in the mood, other girls pop in & the scene is cut as it seems the whole show was an act from the start.

My Personal Review

Tsuyokiss: Cool X Sweet is quite funny & has an interesting plot to it.  The story is different from the game's as the game follows from Leo's point of view whereas the show follows Sunao's instead.  So, we don't have a harem type of anime where it's one guy & a lot of girls.  If you want some comedy to watch during your spare time, give this a shot.

Animation

The character designs seem to be on the boring side as the facial designs are the same as other characters of the same gender.  The eyes are a little bit different in terms of size, but the face structure & size are pretty much the same.  Only the minor characters get a different treatment.  There are times where the characters go SD form a bit, but it rarely happens. 

The backgrounds are okay as much of it is on the dull side.  Not too much details really, but good enough for the show.

The colours are pretty dull with little bright or bold colours.  It kind of makes the show look a bit old.

In terms of the animation movement, it's a mixture.  Sometimes the movements are realistic & sometimes the movements are not normal.  But they are quite smooth with hardly choppy frames found.

Sound       

The sound effects are more on the silly side since this is a comedy anime.  The sounds were crisp & cued on the mark.  But they sometimes get fuzzy on the loud & crashing sounds.

The seiyuus here are average to me.  They are ok for some characters really.  There isn't a favourite voice that I liked from the show.  They have some emotions, but it didn't leave much of an impact on me.

The music really helps create the mood well.  It's quite catchy as it has an upbeat pop feel to it.  Some of the songs actually stick to my head for some reason.

Story

Each episode starts off with Sunao dreaming in some sort of play acting.  It always leads to love for Leo & ends with another girl falling for him or getting interrupted by something.  Either way, she wakes up from the dream.

I'm a bit surprised on the storyline of the show.  It's actually pretty descent for a series that's going for the female view instead of the original male game character.  Although the love story doesn't really build up until the last few episodes of the show, the determination of Sunao's goal to create a theatre club is enough as she won the respect of some schoolmates.  However, the shifting of the story from one place to another seem to occur a lot.  You usually see this with the character intermissions where they pose & say "Tsuyokiss".  Although it's pretty neat, the idea seems to go overboard a bit.

As for the ending, it was ok until the act the Leo & Sunao did by accident at the end.  It makes the show incomplete when I saw that.  Also, the speech act that Sunao did seemed too weird.  Probably because I'm not use to seeing things like that.  But overall, it was good as a lot of the things were wrapped up in terms of the relationship between Sunao & Leo; provided that it's true.

Overall Conclusion

Tsuyokiss: Cool X Sweet is a great anime show to watch for the laughs.  The jokes are pretty funny & does have a fair share of ecchi in it.  However, it's not really something you should put in your must-watch list even though the plot is not bad

Tsuyokiss: Cool X Sweet gets a 7.5/10.  The story is very good for a 12 episode show & that's written differently from the original game.  The jokes are good & entertaining.  However, fans of the series may not like it if they were expecting a story that follows the game's.  Plus, the ending kind of leaves you disappoint by wanting more.

Last updated on January 22, 2008