Believe it or not, I just finished watching the full series of Honey and Clover. I know it kind of seems late now that Honey and Clover II episodes are airing (actually, H&C II is my primary reason for watching H&C.) I’m really glad that I watched the series

One of the highlights of the series was the music. My personal favorite is Waltz, the first ending song. It’s probably one of the catchier ending themes I’ve heard and probably the only one I remember. I’d say it is only revealed by Split, the first ending theme for Honey and Clover’s sequel. Incidentally, both are performed by th same artist. The sad piano themes in both of the series (one of them being a variation of Waltz) are nice to listen to as well.

The broad range of characters makes this anime really enjoyable. My personal favorite was Morita Shinobu, most likely the craziest of the bunch, who possibly is in love with Hagu-chan, just like the series’s main protagonist Takemoto (who’s first name I can’t see to remember.) In addition to Morita, Takemoto and Mayama also stand out as some of the best characters. This is not to say that the other characters are not good ones, which is definately not even close to the truth.

The series did kind of slow down at the end, which makes sense since Takemoto did decide to leave the other characters to go on a very long bike road without having any contact with them. That effectively restrained the amount of drama the series could draw out on the Takemoto-Hagumi-Morita love triangle. Of course, it still had Takemoto’s self-evaluation and the other love story.

I thought the series ended quite nicely. In my opinion, it would have been better if it had just ended right after the confession instead of having Takemoto do a internal monologue. Something tells me that I would be less of a fan of the ending if I didn’t know I would be watching the sequal afterwards, since it does leave quite a cliffhanger at the end.

I really am happy that I decided to pick this up. I’m sure the second season will balance out the Coyote Ragtime Show, which I also picked up recently, quite nicely.

PS: New lumines highscore: ~130K, around level 70. 30 more levels until Lights.