Tears to Tiara

Right, another fantasy 'epic' from Aquaplus; the makers of To Heart and Utawarerumono. I've only managed to catch the anime version a few years later but I thought I'd give it a try since I liked Utawarerumono.


I'm going to be brutally honest here. I found the series to be totally trite. I didn't feel much of a connection to any of the characters except maybe one. But more on that later. The storyline is fairly basic. Hm, there's a demon lord. Let me unseal the demon lord. Only it turns out the demon lord isn't evil. Oh, the female heir to the village will marry the demon lord. Wait...doesn't this all sound very familiar? Did I land in Utawarerumono V2? And therein lies the problem with the series.

With the feeling that I've seen all this before, I drudged through all 26 episodes of the anime. And let me say this, it was really quite tedious at times. Mostly because the first 3 characters you're introduced to are somewhat boring most of the time. 

First there's Rhiannon, who's basically the stereotypical main female character. Shit, the only thing that's missing from her checklists of cliches is that she's not a childhood friend of the main character! Although if you count in the fact that she's technically the 'reincarnation' of one of the girls the hero knew when he was younger...

Then, there's Arthur who really feels like he was going to be the original main protagonist then suddenly he got shifted to the side. I say this not because I like him as a character, but mostly because he's the one who ends up doing most of the things in the anime. But overall his character is fairly annoying, being honorbound in such a way that makes lawful good paladins seem friendly and sociable. Let's not even get into his stupid stabbing fit.

And then there's Arawn; the main character. Or so the writer would like you to believe. Except he really does nothing. It feels like if somebody had taken Lord of the Rings and then decided 'fuck the hobbits, Gandalf is going to be the main character' and then had Gandalf do the same things he did in the original; ie. sit around giving sage advice most of the time. That's kind of what Arawn does, except there's also another sage old man giving sage advice. So he's kinda redundant. For a legendary demon king, he also does jack shit in the anime and he uses ONE spell one time. He's apparently had quite a large impact on the background history of the series but frankly, that means nothing if he's not shown doing anything during the actual series. In this, I think the writing kind of falls flat. 

Frankly, the only character I liked in the entire series was Morgan. And that was because being a genki character, she was like a breath of fresh air in a room full of dullards. Seriously, for a harem/fantasy anime, most of the characters were damn bland. 

As for the storyline...Japan...how bout doing something that doesn't always portray angels as corrupted bastards and good as evil? Seriously, it was edgy the first few times, now it's just sad. Kind of like how almost every FSN fanfic now is a fucking x-over with ZnT. Plus, when they're at the final battle and then suddenly the mayor of one of the towns they stopped by pops up in the final battle; it's pretty WTF. Especially since the mayor doesn't do anything, he just gloats evilly while watching them fight mobs of monsters; that he's not controlling... I have nfi what he was doing there. Did they run out of character designs to use? What? Are there only like 10 unique people in the world of TtT? 

Tl;dr Not worth watching 26 episodes of. It just feels like there's a lot of things missing from the show and in all honesty, the writer needs to stick with writing high school harems because he lacks the maturity for epic fantasy.