Toradora is the sec­ond series in my win­ter catch-up blitz, and it left me speech­less. There is no excuse why I did not pick this show up, even if it aired was dur­ing my the­sis semes­ter. And I call myself a romance-drama fan? *rage@self*

The show sucked me in as early as episode 2 (if I had only watched 1 more ep back then!). By episode 19 (Christ­mas Eve Fes­ti­val), it was already com­pet­ing for my top spot for anime in both the romance (Clan­nad, ef) and drama gen­res (Kanon, DC2SS). Two episodes later when Taiga uncon­sciously voiced her love, it crushed its com­peti­tors and moved onto con­sol­i­dat­ing its posi­tion. By the time the epi­logue rolled, I was left a com­plete emo­tional wreck: happy and rejoic­ing for the cou­ple, but also utterly drained. I had long lost track of how many times tears were brought to my eyes or how many min­utes I was left sob­bing loudly before the pro­jec­tor screen.

[ Shit shit SHIT, I don’t know what hap­pened but some­how I hit the pub­lish but­ton while work­ing on the draft right before going to sleep. That was not sup­pose to hap­pen. I hur­ried to fin­ish and re-published this, will add pic­tars once I get back. This is a dis­as­ter >_< ]

Kita­mura gets my Most Valu­able Char­ac­ter award

Look­ing back to com­pile my thoughts, I was left won­der­ing just why Toradora! destroyed my other beloved romance/drama series so hand­ily, from Kimi­nozo to Shuf­fle! to Clan­nad . It only took me a minute to real­ize that the oth­ers were almost all Visual Novel adap­ta­tions (do Japan­ese guys love cry­ing more than girls or some­thing?). It took me much longer to pin­point just what aspects of the stan­dard Visual Novel sto­ry­board­ing rou­tine caused it to be so out­classed by a light novel series.

Best! Friend! Forever!

Multi-Character Involve­ment

A visual novel is always about the main char­ac­ter and his sur­round­ing cast of hero­ines. The MC then pro­ceeds to branch off into indi­vid­ual routes and then solve each of the heroine’s dilem­mas. Sup­port­ing char­ac­ter may be avail­able to pro­vide advice and back­story in the indi­vid­ual arcs but in the end their role is always lim­ited. Make no mis­take, it is always the MC that is the mover of things, The Magi­cian of the story, whether it be in a Yuuichi (Kanon) good way or a Takayuki (Kimi­nozo) bad way. The Visual Nov­els want to main­tain this pat­tern in order to keep the player in con­trol of the game’s flow and direc­tion. Fur­ther­more, the main char­ac­ter must always be in the obvi­ous cen­ter of all the drama from the very start. While one or two love poly­gons may be pre­sented as the focus of the Vis­nov (School Days, White Album), they usu­ally don’t evolve into a series of over­lap­ping tri­an­gles that makes the rela­tion­ship chart look like a steplad­der. Well unfor­tu­nately, the cir­cle of friends that pro­pels the drama for­ward, rather than the MC, is also what gave Toradora its value.

Would Toradora be as good if Kita­mura wasn’t kept in the cen­ter of the love poly­gon drama for so long? I doubt it. Would they have been able to do it if the Ryuuji/MC (and hence the player) didn’t sin­cerely believe that Taiga was in love with some­one else? I doubt that too. Would they have been able to do this in a Visual Novel: would the fans be able to keep their atten­tion on Taiga if, for most of the series, was busy look­ing at some­one else? Would they be able to present Kitamura’s arc prop­erly? I won­der. Maybe I should try the Toradora visual novel out and see how they did it.

Char­ac­ter Diver­sity and Multipathing

To hit all the Moe bases out there, a Visual Novel always attempts to present a wide vari­ety of char­ac­ters: you have the osana­jimi, the genki, the tsun­dere, the idol, the loli, etc. Some­times they’ll leave out one role or com­bine oth­ers, but there’s usu­ally a selec­tion of hero­ines. The fault here is that some of them sim­ply won’t fit into the main story. Their arcs might be indi­vid­u­ally inter­est­ing, but when they’re mixed into an anime adap­ta­tion they don’t help build up the drama in the true path. Instead it often feels like a series of dis­jointed arcs mixed into one anthol­ogy — except with the same MC tying them all together. Not only does this wreck havoc for the pac­ing, but it also deval­ues the OTP (One True Pair) rela­tion­ship. After all, dear MC did get involved in all these other char­ac­ters who had lit­tle or noth­ing to do with his soulmate.

Imag­ine if all five routes of Kanon were tied together like the paths of Nayuki and Ayu. How much bet­ter would that make the series? This is also why, from a pure romance/drama anime per­spec­tive, Clan­nad is bet­ter than Kanon: because they cut out the two paths they really didn’t, and couldn’t, be fit into Nagisa’s route (Kyou and Tomoyo arcs, each resolved with an OVA episode). This made the Tomoya x Nag­isa pair­ing all the more pre­cious and valuable.

How early was this? Ep8? Damn I wasn’t expect­ing that.

Cry­ing Game vs. Con­tin­u­ous Drama with Inter­mixed Comedy

Sorry KEY, but Toradora’s pac­ing just sucker punched your orig­i­nal cry­ing game for­mula in the face. Instead of build­ing up the char­ac­ters grad­u­ally through pure humor and slice-of-life, drop­ping hints of the pri­mary con­flict along the way, and then hit­ting the cli­max three-quarters of the way in, Toradora starts devel­op­ing every­thing early. True, the first half of the series is still mostly slice-of-life, and we notice only the seeds of the love tri­an­gles being planted, but the drama and sad­ness was already there. Even dur­ing the early episodes of Toradora, I was already feel­ing sym­pa­thetic and sad for the character’s fail­ures and cheer­ing for their suc­cess. In any other series, I’d still be too busy just warm­ing up to the char­ac­ters while ador­ing their cuteness.

Basi­cally what I’m say­ing is that the tra­di­tional cry­ing game for­mula relies on the char­ac­ter traits: their cute­ness, their Moe, their blun­ders, in order to draw the audi­ence in. Toradora does the same thing, but it also empha­size upon one more: the tri­als and fail­ures of their first crush/love, expe­ri­enced in first per­son. It’s still a mod­i­fied cry­ing game approach, but it’s also so much better.

Pos­si­bly Related Posts

• The Tsun­dere Is Not That Sim­ple: Behind The Prickly Persona
• Eien no Aselia Strat­egy Visual Novel Review
• The Cir­cle of Hate in the Visual Novel Com­mu­nity: Eden’s Irony

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