Yoake Mae yori Ruriiro na - Crescent Love

Information of Anime

Years ago, the Earth & moon were at war against each other.  The war was ugly & caused both sides to suffer in great losses.  As a result, both sides stop at a truce.  The Earth & moon have been trying to establish some sort of peace between the two of them.  Mitsuru ga Sakichau Ouren Rakuniushi acts as the single contact point between the two worlds.  At the present time, the Moon Kingdom's princess Feena Fam Earthlight visits Earth to further the peaceful relationship between the two worlds.  She lives with the Asagari residence as a home stay.

Yoake Mae yori Ruriiro na - Crescent Love- (aka Brighter than dawning blue) is based on the ero-game by August.

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.

Tatsuya Asagari, a common high school boy who has a lot of interest in the moon, gets a surprise when Feena uses his home as part of her home stay.  Even more surprising is her going to the same school as him in the same class as a transfer student.  Although Feena takes everyone to not to treat her as a special person, Tatsuya mindlessly takes her as a normal person such as pinching her nose.  Feena's task involves learning about the Earth though normal everyday activities & trying to pass a treat where both the Earth & moon can live in peace.  The bond between Tatsuya & Feena gets stronger & stronger as the two spend a lot of time together.  However, Feena met Tatsuya in the past on Earth when they were children.  Tatsuya's reason why he's so into the moon was to meet the girl in his childhood past who happened to be Feena.  Because of the two's relationship turning into love, some people on the moon were against it. 

The relationship between a moon noble & a commoner Earthling isn't something that would be right.  Currently, Feena is unwillingly engaged with Jurgen von Kruger, a head imperial guard for the king.  There are some people on the moon trying to get rid of Tatsuya in order to prevent another war between the two worlds again.  To make the people understand about their relationship, Feena goes back to the moon to set things & protect Tatsuya.  In the meantime, Jurgen tries to trick the king to his own benefit in order to break the relationship between the moon & Earth.  This cause Feena to lose track of her purpose.

When Tatsuya arrives to the Moon Kingdom with Karen, they search for Feena.  When the couple reunite, they go to the king to state their views of uniting the bonds between the Earth & moon while it's secretly being aired throughout the entire universe.  During this time, Jurgen shows his true colours to the king & the universe of his crimes & is sentenced to prison along with his crew.  Seeing the strong bond that the couple have, the King approves of Tatsuya taking Feena.

The show ends years later with the marriage of Tatsuya & Feena.  Their marriage also symbolizes their hard work which established a strong relationship between the Earth & moon.

My Personal Review

Yoake Mae yori Ruriiro na - Crescent Love- is another average love comedy anime show.  I had some high expectations for the show, but it kind of backfired a bit.  It's still a pretty good show though.

Animation

At first, the character designs are pretty good & decent.  However, the quality went down a lot in the second episode.  I was really shocked to see this sudden drop in quality.  It looked like the drawings are done by a lot of different people.  The faces look very dumbfounded & not like them.  It's simple & out of proportion very often.  It's like kid drawings.  Plus, the characters looked very flat & one dimensional.  After a few episodes, the quality goes back up & down a lot.  It's really unstable.  It's a real shame to watch the show like that.  As a side note, the characters go SD at times too & it's quite cute.  In fact, I found those to be drawn better even though it's pretty bad too.  The studio answered this problem by stating that they will fix over 200 scenes of the poor animation quality in the DVD version.  However, I don't know how the improvements are like.

The backgrounds are pretty detailed in terms of the use of colours.  The toning & shading is very well done.  For some reason, it's way better than the characters.  Quite a shocker.  The colours tend to be light & dull.  When the scenes call for SD characters, the colours get bright & bold.  Fits the mood quite well.

In terms of the animation movement, it's a bit unnatural.  The running isn't smooth as the characters look like they are struggling to go to point A to B in a short distance.  There are quite a lot of those those silly & unreal movements but occurs for the SD characters.  Although some of them are quite fast, they are pretty smooth with signs of choppiness.

Sound       

The sound effects have a mixture of realistic & silly.  The amount of silly sounds outweigh the realistic ones since there are quite a lot of comedy scenes.  They are timed on cue & are crisp.

The seiyuus here are different from the game's.  Some people may or may not like it.  The voices here are average in my view.  They don't give a lot of impact or life to the characters.  It's really dull, but not annoying.

The music is mainly ballads.  I don't know if they are the same ones from the game's soundtrack.  I assume it's different.  They are quite nice for some, but don't create a good mood.  At times, there are some silly songs for those comedic scenes.  Some of them make them quite tense as well for the humour.

Story

The story moves at a somewhat moderate to quick pace.  It was ok at the beginning until it sudden moved at a fast pace when Tatsuya & Feena started questioning about their feelings for each other.  It felt like something was missing in-between.  Otherwise, the plot is descent but average as a lot of shows tend to follow the same format it does.  The enemies & problems that appear in the show tend to be resolved fairly quickly as it seems to be a simple problem.  Because of the number of episodes the show has, it's not surprising to see this kind of situation.  But, the main plot & problem is resolved at a descent pace & stays on track even though the side stuff come in.

When the show started to wrap up, it seem a bit rushed & the solution presented seem to be missing some elements to make it understandable.  Although Jurgen's exposure did the trick, the previous part when Tatsuya & Feena meet the king sounded a bit easy.  It's not a strong answer to make any changes as the solution seem short.  But the follow-up action really fixed it up to make the story work.  The purpose of it is mainly to display the strong love bond that Tatsuya & Feena have for one another.

Overall Conclusion

Yoake Mae yori Ruriiro na - Crescent Love- is a bit of a disappointment.  I had some high expectations of it, but the visuals are really terrible in the TV version.  The storyline is quite nice even though it's average.  Personally, I would suggest watching this show if you like love comedy.  But, it's not something you want to have on your "must watch" list even though I have it on mine's.

Yoake Mae yori Ruriiro na - Crescent Love- gets a seven out of ten.  The plot is average & doesn't sway too much from the main plot.  The ending is pretty solid, but the way it's lead up to it seems unconvincing even though it's used to display the love between Tatsuya & Feena being strong.  The animation from the TV version is very bad that you may not want to watch it almost.  If you can get pass that & the dry voice cast, it's a nice anime to watch.

Last updated on January 22, 2008