Quality entertainment is one thing in any anime show that has ever existed, whether it’s supposed to be the intention or if it was unintentional. With that in mind, many people try to conclude that shows like Date A Live are why anime has gone downhill in recent years because it has officially run out of ideas on what to do with any story. It doesn’t matter how well they tell it, just how it entertains the masses. I find this type of thinking to be overly cynical and silly because this isn’t exactly a new way of thinking. For years, anime studios have put filler shows in season slots since the beginning of anime; whether they were all bad or good is debatable by today’s standards. Nowadays, these harem shows are the best way to churn out these kinds of filler slots to appeal to the casual fan base who like to watch girls flaunt over one guy in comedic ways.

The premise of Date a Live is a common trope of parody anime like The World God Only Knows, where one male character is sent on a mission to capture the hearts of girls around him. The only problem is that Date a Live doesn’t rely on parody or satire. It’s a straight-up action show with romance thrown in for good measure. I can describe this show by taking The World God Only Knows and ripping out most of the charm and wit that show had, and then you have Date a Live. It may seem unfair to say that these two shows are similar when they follow different genres. Still, they are identical in one particular area, which makes them indistinguishable from what I described earlier.

With that said, is the show entertaining to watch regardless of this? Yes, it is. The one thing that I will commend Date a Live is the production value, and the artwork is gorgeous to see. It makes you marvel at the talent the animators have in giving us excellent eye candy even outside of action sequences. Even at a draw distance, the characters still look magnificent even by today’s standards.

With the special praise gone out of the way, how does this show fair with its characters? The characters from their archetypes and personalities are mixed with elaborating this further. On the one hand, you have someone like Tohka, who is an absolute joy to watch because of her very energetic personality. On the other, Origami is very nicely detailed from her battle armor and humorous deadpan emotions. Many characters don’t give anything on the plate of depth or entertainment. You could call them cliches, but sometimes you can develop imaginative ways of providing cliched characters with good depth to them. Still, you hardly get any of that with Yoshino, Kurumi, or Kotori. They’re in the show just because they’re there to get the plot going and nothing else. It doesn’t help the fact to make the story going when you put too many filler arcs that aren’t very entertaining in the first place.

While I’m discussing the characters in Date A Live, Shido himself is a weak protagonist in the sense that there’s absolutely nothing about him that makes him a well-rounded individual. He is nothing more than your average teenage boy who is friendly but doesn’t have the guts to ask any girl of the girls anything with a straight face. Yes, I know some real-life guys are like him. But in no single second did they give any strong trait that makes him indistinguishable from other protagonists in most harem shows. I know it’s not often you get protagonists such as Yokodera in Hentai Ouji or Tomoki from Sora no Otoshimono who are very strong in expressing their feelings, but is that asking too much?

One major problem that needs to be said is the show’s overall pacing, not only with the plot but also with the character progression. It seemed as though the writers wanted to rush out the essential steps that made great characters and didn’t bother to slow things down. These steps would make the girls understand Shido more instead of him just kissing the girls to make them head over heels for him. It is not uncommon to see anime adaptations of manga or Light Novels skip many things that the source material initially laid out. Still, it’s essential to realize that the best way is to cut the unimportant arcs in the original Light Novel. From what I can tell, being a person who never read the novel, they seemed to have rushed some plot arcs that seemed crucial in the Light Novel. Then there’s the ending that looked like a cop-out telling us, “Hey, there’s going to be a sequel! So you’re just going to have to deal with it!” At least that’s what I wished they should have said. At best, that could have been a little more amusing.

In the sound department, the voice actors do an excellent job with their material. Marina Inoue as Tohka is a definite highlight out of everyone from the cast. From the sound of her voice, you can tell right away that she was having tons of fun voicing herself.

In the current Spring season of 2013, I would say this is not a terrible show to sit through. I did have some decent fun with the great action scenes and charming comedy, for what little material they could come up with. With the 2nd season announced, I wouldn’t mind sitting through another season of this. Let us hope that they will learn from their mistakes and make it better than the first one.

Grade: C+