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| Overall | Art | Animation | Character Design | Music | Series Story | Episode Story | Reviewer | |
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| Buy | 8 | 8 | 8 | 7 | 8 | 7 |
 Ggultra2764
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[series:1275#1552] |
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Just as fun as the first season, School Rumble: Ni Gakki continues where the silliness of the character relationship misunderstandings left off. This time around, Ni Gakki has some new characters and possible pairings for you to see both some touching and humorous moments with. The Harima/ Yakumo pairing was perhaps the best pairing of this season featuring a good amount of chemistry between the pairing and even earning some tension in Yakumo's bond with Eri, a girl with her own interests in Harima. This season focuses a little more on developing some of the character relationships and throwing in more parodies. I did notice some greater development on Tenma's interactions with Harima and Karasuma which show signs that these character relationships have developed a bit. In addition, Ni Gakki makes parodies more often to specific aspects of Japanese culture like sentai shows, mahou shoujos, and over-the-top melodrama found in cliched action-drama titles. The fact there were some plot arcs thrown into this season was even more apparent with the basketball game and Harima being homeless. While the character chemistry was still as silly as ever for me to laugh at, the parodies tended to be hit-or-miss for me. I recall an entire episode being nothing more than a number of shorts parodying specific anime genres that didn't really roll over for me too well. And even with the pairing developments, there was still no resolution to them in this series. In terms of visuals, the artwork and character designs for Ni Gakki are still as average as the first season. Despite my issues with the parodies and lack of resolution, School Rumble: Ni Gakki is still a bucket full of laughs with all the misunderstandings taking place between the potential romantic pairings of the series. Last updated Sunday, July 26 2009. Created Sunday, July 26 2009. | ||||||||
| Buy | 8 | 8 | 8 | 8 | 8 | 9 |
 Dreamer
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[series:1275#2279] |
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Yes!! Here we go with second season. I couldn't wait to see this one since I thoroughly enjoyed the first season. Art, Animation and Character Design The art and animation was average but seemed improved over the first season. The frame rate was average as well but at times seemed like it got a bit choppy (still). The character designs were more or less the same as the first series though there was slight improvement in art. Music The OP was even better than the first series! Still cute and funny! Wow! 2 times in a row! That's super rare for me! It was an up-beat, pop-rock style this time. Episode and Series Story Wow, more gut busting laughs and slapstick antics. All your lovable characters are back for more. This time around we have a better developing plot and the love polygons begins to get unwound. However with all that said, our two main characters, Tenma and Harima are still not any closer together in a relationship. It's still the same "darn, I missed my chance" scenario for Harima and Tenma? Well, she's still as clueless as ever.... which adds to her charm. Overall, this anime did a good job in making me laugh. The plot, though more involving than previous, still didn't really develop as one would have hoped. Still, it's a great show and would recommend it as a buy. Last updated Sunday, February 22 2009. Created Sunday, February 22 2009. | ||||||||
| Rent | 7 | 7 | 8 | 7 | 7 | 8 |
 Devil Doll
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[series:1275#752] |
[Score: 74%, a minimum "Rent-"]
The most interesting characters of this series are those two who actually care for him - Yakumo (Tenma's marvelous imouto-san) and Eri (the rich blond denial queen), both of which save Harima's butt at least once and even support him going for Tenma in their very own way. The internal conflicts of (and between) these two girls are what a decent romance series would have focused on, but this show gives less than 25% of the episodes to the main love polygon's issues. The first half of this series is mostly "let's take the characters we know already and put them into a new environment"... which is funny (even I get a good laugh of it now and then, and the embarrassing scenes aren't that many). The first episodes had lots of unreal elements (samurai, gunfights) and almost nothing to do with the main plot; from episode 4 on (the school festival) this series returns to what it was in the prequel - romantic triangles and misunderstandings. The "sub-arc" writing with more time for certain events has its pros and cons: The theater play (though largely ripped off from Love Hina) was wonderful and the cooking competition was funny, the basketball arc was entertaining at the expense of ever more new characters... the longer a sub-arc without the main polygon takes, the further away from actually romance we get. Half-way through this show, the focus is put back on Tenma (being less of an airhead now while Karasuma-kun isn't around) and Harima (still being laughing stock but with honest intentions, and even sacrificing his own hopes on occasion); Yakumo (my favourite character of this show) is getting more air time and more influential scenes now, and Eri-chan has good scenes as well (e. g. the birthday of Harima's younger brother), so finally there's a bit of the romance back. The main downside is that both Tenma and Harima repeat the same mistakes over and over again while several side characters have actually grown over time. Many of the funny events rely on misunderstanding, embarrassingly stupid behavior and/or blatant lies. And the series has lots of parody (e. g. the Yakumo scene at the mirror in episode 25 is referencing to Sia in episode 16 of Shuffle!) as replacement for storyline development. Due to those many references to other shows, this is perhaps not suitable for anime beginners as they will fail to know the references, and it isn't a show for true romance fans either. But if you like painful slapstick failure scenes and silly-funny school comedy with "romance" being shown as every single character fawning around his/her beloved one and holding long and embarrassing soliloquies, then this is very much your show. Last updated Wednesday, September 01 2010. Created Monday, April 28 2008. | ||||||||
| Rent | 8 | 8 | 8 | 7 | 7 | 7 |
 Big Fire
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[series:1275#2441] |
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Well if you bought the first season, i guess you have to BUY this one too, but where school rumble season 1 had me laughing at just about every episode, season2 kinda was a....Eh...although towards the end there was a really funny
race scene that they incorporated into the anime(+++ only for that one episode) the rest was ho hum more of the same, people getting close but not really, no one has progressed as far as there relationship has gone and everone is still with no one...i guess by now at least one of these triangles should be resolved right? Anyways, i didn't enjoy it as much as season 1 so give it a rent for now...maybe when the dubbed version comes out, i might be able to roll with the jokes more smoothly than reading it...on a positive note season 3 is coming and i have nothing but high hopes...
Last updated Friday, March 21 2008. Created Friday, March 21 2008. | ||||||||
| Buy |
 Forbin
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[series:1275#1573] | ||||||
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Hohohohohohohohohohohohohoho. It's only episode 1 and it's got a BUY rating from me!.... Hohohohohohohohohohohohohoho BANANA! Btw I don't like the new OP and ED. Something I noticed about 2nd season. It mostly about the romance of the side characters, and we hardly ever see Karusama and they REALLY need to develop the whole Harima and his harem story. Episode List
Last updated Thursday, June 08 2006. Created Saturday, April 08 2006. | ||||||||
| Buy | 7 | 7 | 8 | 8 | 8 | 8 |
 AstroNerdBoy
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[series:1275#436] |
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If you didn't care for the first School Rumble title, its safe to say you won't be wasting your time reading this review. That said, if you loved School Rumble and School Rumble OVA Ichigakki Hoshu, you're in for more whacky, parody-filled goodness. One thing that sets this new series apart is that the writers went for multi-episode story-arcs this time. Since I've not read the manga beyond volume 3, I don't know how close these come to the original manga or if they go off on their own to a great extent. However, the initial three episodes, dealing with a decision on whether the class does a play or cafe for the school festival, are a complete parody of the various "school battles" titles (Ikki Tousen comes to mind, though this really isn't a good example). I wasn't as impressed with these three episodes, but with episode 4 (which continues into the school festival) the laughs return. The school festival then runs through episode 6, which places quite an interesting (and funny) end. The sports parody (dealing with basketball) was OK and while humorous, wasn't my cup of tea. The episode where the American movie Ghost (among other things) is parodied was pretty good. The series deals with Japanese ghost stories. The series takes another humorous look at the manga publishing world. In fact, there's just way to many things to list that the series parodies or looks at. And it is amazing how many things the writers cram into the class's winter break, which lasts from episode 15-26. While parody and humor are the chief objectives are the series, the writers manage to slip in a few little nice touches, which pick up from School Rumble. So we get small looks at the lives of various characters, including minor characters. We get the hints of Eri-chan's attraction to the man she calls Hige (Harima). We get hints of Yakumo-chan's attaction to Harima. And there are other nice little touches that one might not expect from such a whacky, parody, comedy series. Episode 26 elevates this as the humor takes a back seat (while not being forgotten) to dealing with things like Yakumo-chan and Tenma-chan's relationship as sisters. The writers may have gotten a tad too serious with this episode because even though the humor isn't forgotten, the level of seriousness is a shock (though to be fair, I suspect this too is a parody). But it works, save for one element with Yakumo-chan which is dropped before the end of the episode. The series end refers to "San Gakki" (third term) and seems to indicate that there will be another series made. I'm not sure if that'll happen or if that's just something to tease the audience. However, because the characters are so much fun and the humor is laugh-out-loud many times, I do hope this will happen. Bottom line: This series is somewhat different in nature than School Rumble with its greater focus on long-running parodies story-arcs, but still manages to score many good laughs in the process. With FUNimation having the license for this, there is no doubt that I will be pre-ordering every episode as it becomes available!Last updated Friday, September 29 2006. Created Friday, April 07 2006. | ||||||||
Other Sites
| Name | URL |
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| Japanese Series Web Site | http://www.school-rumble.net/ |
