Triangle Heart 3: Sweet Songs Forever

• Drama: Med (this is a thriller after all)
• Comedy: None (this is a thriller after all)
• Action: High (full of high-speed battle action, mostly with swords)
• SciFi: None (plain old earth, normal people)
• Ecchi: None (kawaii girls, but still... none)

• Episode 1 sets up the stage and presents a lot of characters - too many for my taste (I watched this episode twice in a row to remember at least most of them), so there could not be enough time to make use of them all (same problem as with Dragon Knight 4 - and both are based on H games! But you will find nothing about that in this OVA, really). Still, we learn a lot about Fiasse's friends here, and how far the opponents are willing to go. And it is not quite clear how well the 'joint forces' (Miyuki, Kyouya and Alice/Erisu - that not-so-Japanese woman being the most interesting character of the show; like AstroNerdBoy I had problems to like the other leads) will cooperate to stop them.
• Episode 2 is creating some additional problems, as the scenario would not be really interesting if everything went too well. But it provides a good progress of the story without too much butchering (you can't really name this a "fight").
• Episode 3 is dedicated to the first concert of the tour in Japan. It would spoil the story to say more - but yes, "thriller" is the correct category.
• Episode 4 of course answers a lot of questions (more than the average anime ending does); and some (but not all) of them are really nice. You don't learn who the opponent was but what he was after, and that's enough in this case.

The setup episode made this seem like a mystery-thriller anime title with some traditional kick-butt Japanese swordfighting from the brother and sister duo of Miyuki and Kyouya. OK, maybe this was accurate, but it was so poorly done that it just barely kept me watching.

Since this is based off of the "H" game of the same title, all of the cute girls you could "put it in" with are included, though most are only in cameo roles (if I read things correctly, there were 12 girls in the game). So there is some wasted time giving all of these girls screen time. As to the story, the first episode did some nice setup work, but then went nowhere with it. It would have been nice to see how all of the four main characters met as kids and what all they did as kids. We get some glimpses of this, but that's all. So there's nothing to help us see how close they'd all been other than their saying, "we were childhood friends". Then there is the tie with the villian which really isn't explored either. We are given the facts and that's about it. Quite frankly, I ended up being bored by the whole thing. Copious amounts of blood aren't going to change my mind, nor are the fancy sword techniques used. The sword stuff can be cool, but because I ultimately didn't connect with any of the characters, I didn't care about how they fought.

For an OAV, this had some surprisingly weak animation. There were lots of pan-and-scan shots as well as shots were there was minimal movement. This is even more surprising since there were at least three "H" games in the series, a radio drama, several music CD's, dakimakura (a special body pillow), and more. So it seems the franchise was somewhat successful.

Bottom line: had the characters been better developed, the mystery better done, and the story as a whole better potted, I would have enjoyed this. As it is, it isn't anything special.

Last updated Monday, March 01 2004. Created Monday, August 18 2003.