Fortune Arterial: Akai Yakusoku

Title:Fortune Arterial: Akai Yakusoku
FORTUNE ARTERIAL 赤い約束 (Japanese)
Overall:Watch
Keywords: , , , , , , ,
Notables: KANDA Rie
ONO Daisuke
After a childhood full of school transfers, Hasekura Kouhei's parents finally send him to a traditionally-Christian boarding school so he won't have to move with them. Finally free to have the calm and uninterrupted school life he's always wanted, he instead find himself busy with a swarm of idiosyncratic friends.
(Synopsis courtesy of ANN)

TV series, 2010, 12 episodes, 25 min; see also: Fortune Arterial OVA 2011
赤い約束 ("akai yakusoku") means "red promise".
OverallArtAnimationCharacter Design MusicSeries StoryEpisode StoryReviewer
Watch 9 8 8 8 8 7 Dreamer [series:2400#2279]
The synopsis above made this series sound like a light episodic one with humor. It makes no mention of vampires until you actually see the first episode. It wasn't a bad series really.

Art, Animation & Character Designs
Artwork and animation is pretty decent. There's some good use of lighting effects, which always brings the artwork and animation to life. Details here were pretty well done... a high level of details in both the backgrounds and foreground. Character designs weren't too shabby either. The girls were mostly kawaii.

Music
The OP wasn't anything to get excited about. It was a pop piece with female vocals but it wasn't bad honestly. The soundtrack was mostly light, with pianos mostly, but also a bit of flutes and a light orchesta (I think). The ED was like a lullaby. It was a pretty light piece with female vocals, beautiful voice.

Series and Episode Story
At first I was thinking this was going to be a harem (even though it's not labeled as such). However, after a few episodes in, I realized it wasn't going to be the case. Of course, we did have your typical and stereotypical character types, episode topics and such. For example, a cute, kawaii loli character as one of the mains, "long lost" childhood friends and etc. With that said, it makes the show a bit unoriginal but, as the episodes progress, you'll realize that there's enough originality to give this series a lift.

I'm still not sure if vampires were even worth having in this series. The concept (the vampires) almost seem a sidenote of the ordinary events of the series.... school life. However, we do, and very slightly, get a bit of vampire story telling near the last few episodes. But even then, these were still pretty mild and really didn't do much for me. It's the actual episodes that make this series worth watching.... and marginally.

Overall, this was a mild entertainment with some kawaii characters and pretty artwork. It's still worth watching if you're an anime fan as I.

Last updated Tuesday, March 08 2011. Created Tuesday, March 08 2011.
Watch Stretch [series:2400#628]
(Watch+)

(All episodes watched):

Here's a show which almost had me beating my head against a wall at one point, but then improved considerably, much to my surprise, and left me feeling glad that I had stayed to the end.

Among my first impressions were that this show had a video game feel to it; it seemed kind of corny and stereotypical, as a boy enters a new school and meets lots of cute girls. It was also vaguely evident that something strange was going on behind the scenes. FA seemed to have a whimsical attitude full of silly goings on--and then a vampire appears. That seemed out of place enough, but then, rather than being terrified, main character Kohei basically shrugs it off and hurries off to meet a girl at a prearranged site. Surely stuff like this happens every day at these big-city boarding schools, right? In episode two it's as if both Kohei and the writers themselves have forgotten about the vampire incident altogether. This seemed like a goofy school romance which once in a while spliced in a vampire bit. Is this some sort of a joke, I wondered, or is the writing just very sloppy? I didn't hate this show, I just couldn't understand what was going on.

Maybe a vampire gets a fortune worth of blood when it bites into an artery; that's the best explanation for the title I can come up with. The vampires seem relatively friendly and have taken an interest in Kohei, even persuading him to take a seat on the student council. Still no excuse for the neck-biting incident Kohei witnessed, however. I wish the plot would speed up and tell me whether there will really be any meat to this show. Episode five makes no mention of vampires at all, it is just a typical B-level school athletic festival episode. That was pretty much the story of the series as a whole at this point: a second-class school romance/comedy which once in a while reminds us that there are at least a couple of vampires on campus. But whether anything would come of this strange twist had yet to be seen.

Would somebody tell me why vampires were included in this show? That was the thought going through my mind at around the halfway point. There is no mention of them in episode six either. Instead a corny memory loss incident among Kohei's longtime female friends is uncovered. But it was dull. If Fortune Arterial had been a 26-er, I'd definitely have quit right here, and whether I would keep watching to the end of this one-season show remained to be seen. Since something like half of all anime series nowadays never provide a decent conclusion anyway, I was tempted to abandon this one.

With some trepidation I decided to watch one more episode, and to my surprise a plot twist which involves vampires takes place. It makes some sense, too; I could be reading too much into this, but the thought occured to me that a human-vampire(Kouhei-Sendo) romance which works out in a sort of Romeo-Juliet manner would be neat. Perhaps this won't be a B-class school romance series, which just for the hell of it tacked on some vampires, after all. The filler episodes up until now might serve a purpose after all, since they make it all the more startling that the cute and attractive Sendo really is a vampire when you get right down to it. Have I mentioned that I like the snappy OP song?

It looks like I will have to eat some of my words, because it turns out that that memory loss business makes perfect sense in connection to what happens in episode eight. I'm glad I didn't give up on FA earlier, because this was actually pretty neat. The way all the parts came together in an unexpected yet plausible and even moving way was pleasantly surprising. This is a good omen for the series' future, and I'm curious once again to see where this is going.

After wasting a lot of time early on, the story seems to be moving almost too quickly now. I was wondering where the real menace, the threat which would lead to a climax of the show, was. I'm not sure the 'enemy' that was presented to us was a good choice; this person's revelation came in such a corny manner that I almost laughed. But I'll give the story a chance. The way episode ten ended was surprisingly moving--a neat touch. Once in a while in assorted series I get this feeling, 'that was clever'. Who would have thought that one would turn up in FA! It turns out that Kohei hasn't agreed to become Sendo's 'servant' after all, as I had thought. The upcoming school Cultural Festival seems to play a major part in this show, just as in many others. As an American who didn't even bother to attend my high school prom, I wonder why this is so.

What's unusual about Fortune Arterial is that the vampires never run wild, and there isn't much horror to the story. It's far more of a love story than a horror one. The ending was sort of an anti-climax, and spicing up the dialogue would've been a good idea. But I still felt good about the way things had worked out. I couldn't help feeling that this seemed more like an arc end than the end to a story as a whole, since Sendo still has a certain problem. But FA took a novel approach to a common genre, and even if it wasn't brilliant it served as a breath of fresh air.

My favorite line: "Vampires, eh? I'd love to see one if they really existed" --Iori Sendo

Last updated Saturday, January 15 2011. Created Tuesday, October 19 2010.

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