“Once upon a time, on this island, there was a girl that fell in love with a boy.”

It’s certainly not just one girl to be worried about in Da Capo…

Da Capo is a pretty in-your-face harem series, unlike perhaps more subtle, more character-driven shows like sola and the Key works. The latter are technically harem shows, but they occasionally have other focuses other than how much everybody loves the male protagonist.

There is no such playing around in that sense in Da Capo. Pretty much everyone falls for – if they’re not already in love with – Jyunichi Asakura, a normal schoolguy with a couple magical abilities, such as the power to see dreams and to produce funny food out of his hand.

His harem is equally slightly unorthodox, including:
- Nemu, his little sister (but not really)
- Sakura, his other little sister (but really, not really)
- Miharu, who comes in two flavors: robot and not robot
- Moe and Mako, twins of two different styles (one might say moe and not-moe)
- Yoriko, the cat-eared maid
- Kotori, the school idol

I say slightly unorthodox because while the cast does seem built mainly to reach as many different appeal types as possible – lolicon, siscon, meido…con, big breast girl…con… nearly every character does have a bit of depth to them with hidden secrets and stories.

By no means is Da Capo another Kanon, in that one’s going to be in tears after every plot revelation. But one will find that there is a Almost Logical reason for there to be Cat Maids and lolis.

In fact, one of Da Capo’s strengths is it’s overarching theme. Most anime take at least a swing as creating some sort of thing that ties everything together; in some it’s worked well, in others, it’s just implausible; but the theme in Da Capo, the ever-blossoming cherry blossom trees, plays a big role in just about everything supernatural in the story without becoming silly.

But on becoming silly terms, look no further than the first, well, sixteen episodes of Da Capo. It’s certainly a series that could’ve been condensed into a series half it’s length, as the first half and change of the series was essentially filler. There was some useful character development and exposition in some of the episodes but largely these episodes had very little development outside of Moe’s cup size.

As well, even when the series actually gets going, an 8-minute chunk of the episode (with the exclusion of the final 4 episodes) is reserved for a “Side Episode”, more light-hearted stuff that I’m sure would be great if I weren’t dying to get to the content.

In short Da Capo is not exactly a series that moves fast and I think it would lose in a footrace to Moe’s speech rate (she clocks in at about the lighting slow speed of Sae of sola). If one has more tolerance than I for random fanservice and wacky hijinks then Da Capo will certainly be a much better series, but for me…it’s just silly.

I’ve whined about it time and time again if you’ve been following the blogging on D.C. but in the end the series did manage to redeem itself with some useful high-pace episodes in the end. It’s a strange approach to the show, considering that even within the show itself divisions were labeled and apparent between the non-plot first sixteen and the action-packed (sort of) final ten.

Da Capo doesn’t pace itself very well and certainly seemed on the verge on stumbling over itself during the last few episodes as it tried to pack in all the plot that was missing, but in the end the conclusion was much more satisfying than originally expected.

This might be in the least because the main relationship between Jyunichi and the winner was one of the least touched on aspects of the show. It was pretty much said and done in one episode, and then the rest of the series dealt with the rest of the cast; so there’s very little shafting done (note very little, not none).

That’s pretty much all I can say at the pre-jump; post-jump we’ll take a look back at my predictions from episode one and analyze some more of the characters in depth. If you want a tl;dr summary of Da Capo, it’d pretty much be this: if harem shows aren’t your thing, this isn’t going to come close to changing your mind. If you do like them though, Da Capo is a worthwhile if not great watch; and hang in there, the good stuff comes late, but it’s there in the end.
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