Kokoro Connect

I have genuinely impressed myself writing something so long for an anime like this, and resorting to so much profanity, but lo and behold: this is what Kokoro Connect does to a man. If you're in the mood for riding a shitstorm, get ready because this is gonna be a big one. Spoilers for the entire anime ahead, though trust me, you're better off this one. If you want a spoiler-less TLDR, read the last paragraph. So, Kokoro Connect. Despite its efforts to bring out something convincing, like seemingly solid characters and a decent story setting, this anime unfortunately ends up in a fucking disaster, toput simply. Especially when it comes to dialogue and drama, this anime goes way too south. Even for supernatural standards, the actions of our heroes range from unrealistic to blatantly stupid, with the exception of Inaban who, in the majority of our scenes is the only character you can believe is a normal person. A retarded "villain", poor thought investment in some otherwise interesting ideas, and a complete Armageddon when it comes to drama. With that said, let's get a closer look at this disaster. If this show wanted to impress me with its ideas, it should try much harder. There are anime like Kimi no na wa explore the first concept of the story way better, and even though its characters might be simple, they are nonetheless much more believable than those in Kokoro Connect. Even with the lackluster development our first idea gets in the four episodes it is implemented, it eventually gets abandoned for a rotation of phenomena. Through the anime, our villain, "Heartbeat", uses four different ways to manipulate our characters, ultimately separating the anime into four different mini-arcs. And while the first one is kind of interesting, the rest are just boring, vague, or outright copies of previous ones. All of them though, and exceptionally the first one, are missing a very important element: credibility. In the context it is presented, this anime wants me to believe that instead of bringing terrible confusion, misunderstandings, and even worse, the body-switching actually brings our characters in a "good" position to resolve their problems and bring them closer and happier like nothing is happening... you want me to believe that everyone just lives with other peoples' parents just fine, although they might not even know their names? Or that they can go on with other peoples' friends? Hell, they presumably don't even know what each others' houses look like to begin with. Yet nothing of the mentioned is ever brought up, let alone discussed. The only "real problems" that occur are things like someone going to the wrong toilet or... I don't know, a man touching the boobs of a female body he's in? And I know that the body switching only occurs temporarily, but that doesn't nullify the fact that major problems are overlooked, while attention is centered on comedy and shenanigans. If those "major problems" were dealt with even a little, speaking not only for the first arc but every other one, this anime would be much better. It was a huge opportunity to flesh out our characters and understand how and why they are living like they do, things that could also be presented in a rather interesting way because of our body switching. Instead of that though, the personalities of our characters are revealed to us very directly, and the body switching only seems to be the motive for them to open up rather than the cause. So let's see how that happens in our first phenomenon. It's actually really simple, we have what I like to call a classic "screwdriver" scenario: the girl club members reveal some kind of personal issues, and Taichi, being Jesus Christ himself, goes on to kiss their ass cheeks and damn, everyone is fine suddenly. Keep in mind that Aoki, our only other male member, never had any problems because... I don't know, he's in the male cast, and the only one who even remotely got a chance to help any of the girls was Taichi (same-sex personal advice is pretty gay, miss me). And how are their problems solved, you may ask? Well, for example, Yui's androphobia is perfectly healed by Taichi kicking himself in the balls from her body. Nice! We also get another nice surprise. I said every girl had some problem, but hey, the anime tells us that Inaban doesn't have any problems; she, instead was born with an INHERENT distrust towards other people. After taking your time to digest what the fuck you just read, you might realize that this was a pretty stupid idea. In fact, this attempt was so cringe-worthy that Inaban herself had to physically say "how can you fix a problem if there isn't one?" And I wasn't going to support this argument any further, but I find this a nice opportunity to connect this point with the aforementioned absence of coherence and credibility in this anime. So, Inaban tells us that she doesn't trust anyone. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only time I can sense any kind of distrust from Inaban is when she refuses to believe the club members, when they explain the body-switching phenomenon to her. Which is simply common fucking sense. Then again she expresses fears that her friends might do something mischievous with her body, yet we don't get the tiniest glimpse of someone even HAVING THE IDEA of doing something unwanted with Inaban's body, or anyone's body for that matter. In fact, the only time someone is trying to do something remotely bad is the mentioned boob touching, which clearly was for LOLZ XD and did not get picked upon further than that. And while Yui did have a traumatic experience to make her androphobia serious and believable, and Nagase did have a messy childhood with an unstable family (although we get no insight into either of them), Inaban's problem does not get a pass. Where is Inaban's problem based? Why should she even have a problem like the others in the first place? And why is Taichi the one "fixing" it and everything else? Please note that I'm making these questions from a writer's standpoint, and not from a realistic social perspective. That would be fucked up. In fact, nothing in this anime is realistic, so keep that in mind as I express my ideas. With that being said, perhaps now is a good time to get a better look at our characters, and what a better way to kick it off other than with our bro, Taichi. This man. Who is he? Probably Buddha himself, everyone pays praises to his shrine daily for fertile crops and many many children. Actually, to say that Taichi resembles God Himself would be an understatement. Guy loves everyone, forgives everyone, and solves everyone's problems. Don't forget that he can, at will, make any girl fall in love with him. Quite the god I'd say. Any attempts to make this character any short of original were thrown out of the window immediately. The promising "original trait" our bro had was something like a "hardcore" wrestling fan, that was not only cringe but was also 100% discarded somewhere around the middle part of this anime and never brought up ever again (maybe it was for the best). Seriously, it was just cringe, if you exclude a laugh I got from the John Cena poster at the beginning. Everything else about him is unoriginal, bland, and boring. There is nothing interesting about him because he does not oppose anyone or anything, other than himself. His thinking is as white as it can possibly get, and his responses to questions that challenge morality (yes, the show actually has one or two moments where this happens - unbelievable, I know!) are equally ambiguous so as to not ruin his God character. He wants to be friends with everyone, everyone loves him in return and all is good in the world. There is no purpose behind his character besides the "I WILL SAVE EVERYONE!!!" mentality, becoming a "selfless freak" quite literally: it feels as if he dedicated his very existence to saving everyone and anyone, even if he has to kill himself ten times in the process. In fact, he cannot STAND at the thought of someone else getting hurt instead of him, considering this as some sort of medieval torture... like oh god, did he fail to save a flying cockroach because he was unable to body shield it from a train? He will probably commit sudoku from his guilt and regret it as much as possible before he does so. Sounds pretty sound to me. What is the meaning of such a character? He doesn't live for himself, but for everyone else. He has no ambitions. He puts no value in his life. In the hospital scene, he's the first to offer himself. It doesn't take him more than five fucking seconds to make it his final decision. He becomes literal cannon fodder. Ego death in its purest form. Yet he's somehow our main character, someone our anime thinks should be an exemplary figure? But really, who am I to judge? Our God Taichi does nothing wrong. The only thing that He does not right in the entirety of the anime is to not recognize the "real self" of Nagase, but in reality, no one could. In any other case, His love extends toward infinity. If anyone ever feels even slightly bad for, let's say spilling some of his piss outside the toilet, He won't rest until that person achieves inner peace and spiritual transcendence, and He will tell everyone that he won't so that they can further comprehend the depth of His pure heart and soul. I'd say God bless Taichi, but who am I kidding. He is God Himself. I'll get Aoki and Yui out of the way fast because they're just useless. Aoki himself is the King of Kings when it comes to filler characters. The only interesting moment for him is when he gets some beef with Taichi, and things could get better for him if... you know, the problem wasn't resolved with comedic relief? The only other characteristic Aoki can be remembered for is his ability to instantly ejaculate whenever Yui does literally anything in his vicinity. Which seriously feels as if he was programmed to do so when he does it to such an extent. Yui though is a significant upgrade. She gets TWO moments in the anime! Hell yeah, Aoki would be proud. The first one is during our second phenomenon, where she basically locks herself in her home forever. Reason being? She's afraid that her desire to literally kick ass would be unleashed and world peace would be compromised. To be real though, her actions can be justified. The only problem is that the whole thing does nothing to add anything to Yui as a character. She only expresses a normal impulse to not harm others, which is understandable but not a thing to dedicate episodes and characters coming to her home like firemen to get her out. Eventually, she gets roasted by Inaban and this part ends. The second moment involves the addition of another random character that arrives out of nowhere, to tell Yui that she's not living her life correctly because she gave up on Karate. Nice! Apparently, here's where another one of Yui's traits is revealed, and that is her dependence on others. This was not bad because it connects well with her previous moment as well. If we exclude yet again more pointless whining from her, this was an okay moment for Yui. The epitome and grand finale of her character are near the end of the anime, where she cries about "being a side character" (I'm not joking), she then hugs Aoki and her character is complete. Nagase is probably the most complicated and the one with the most changes. She gets interesting because in the fourth act she eventually deviates a lot from how we knew her, but things could be done smoother and ultimately much, MUCH better in regards to that. Things had seemingly settled down after the first act regarding her personality issues, but that did not end up being the case. We don't get much of her in the second phenomenon, in the third one we only get bits of her, and in the fourth one shit goes haywire. The problem which our friend Nagase reveals is that she adopts different personalities to please her social cycle according to each one's needs. In accordance with her, her real self is hidden behind all the fake ones, and apparently, once the fourth phenomenon appears, the veil of her fake personalities starts to fade and she goes batshit crazy, not knowing what to do. Things would be fine with her problem if it wasn't for a simple fact: a lot of people are like that! Yes, you heard that right, we are all clowns in the same circus. It's actually embarrassing that I feel like I have to explain this, so try skipping this paragraph... anyway, it's not the same for all, but everyone adopts some kind of different personality in social interactions. Everyone filters themselves depending on who we interact with. We will act differently with our family, we'll act differently with our friends, differently with our teachers, and so forth. Our brains get hardwired to act more or less restrained and respectfully depending on our familiarity and relevant social standing with the person in question, and different elements of our personality appeal to different members of society. I don't fucking need to explain this, IT'S BASIC HUMAN INTERACTION. The issue with this, and this is to an extent the same issue that is addressed with Nagase, is the deviance between each personality. Greater divergence leads to a greatly different personality on a fundamental level. That means that we'll have to commit more and more to the defining traits of each personality, eventually putting too much effort and strain to support such an image. That can become tiresome, annoying, and to a greater extent even disgusting and repelling to us: pretending we are someone that we aren't. Now I don't know if Nagase has a personality disorder or not related to that issue, but regardless, it actually makes Nagase the most believable character in terms of personality. Or that would be the case if it wasn't for yet another problem (profanity alert)... Once she stops assuming her "different personalities", one would normally expect to see what kind of person she really is. And in a sensible fashion, the rest of the cast seeks to do the same: to understand what she really wants to become. They truly want to accept the "real" Nagase or what else, go along, and be friends with her like they've always been. It's totally understandable. Yet what does Nagase do? She proceeds to be the most arrogant bitch she could possibly get. She turns that bitch meter to the MAX, like there is no tomorrow, and if there was a limit she would get past it, aiming to be the QUEEN of bitches. Now why, would a poor soul ask? Every time people ask her what she wants, and what kind of person she wants to become, what does she reply? "You don't understand. You wouldn't get it. No one gets me." This happens SO many times. She purposely avoids everything, not telling anything about her or what she wants, regardless of how malicious or disturbing that COULD be. She acts as if, you know, actually saying what the fuck she wants isn't the most obvious solution to the problem. Trying to be the worst person for everyone, trying to make everyone hate her, because... reasons? Is that her "real" personality? Of course not. It's just that she was nice to everyone before this, so now she decided to be the biggest bitch for the sake of being a bitch - and so a bitch she became! People ask her what she wants? She replies with a huge middle finger to everyone. Taichi then, being the absolute sigma male God that he is, attempts to draw the bad reputation of her bitchy personality by telling the entire class that he attempted to rape her. I'll admit, I'm not brave enough to ask how the gears and cogs inside a God's brain work, but for now we can focus on the fact that he committed social suicide to give an external excuse to Nagase's bitchy behavior. And how does Nagase reply to this divine intervention? She actually decides to stand by and watch, and not even speak to him afterwards. No, that wasn't her best friend sacrificing their ass for her, it's just a random loser who cannot understand the depth of Nagase. But wait! Wait a minute, when Inaban is in a life-threatening situation and NAGASE KNOWS THAT, she will prefer to do nothing but lie on bed trying to figure out if Taichi loves her or not. Yes, ladies and gentlemen. This actually happens. But before you give up on her, wait! Give that poor soul a chance to redeem herself. Because she eventually wakes up from her slumber eons later to save Inaban and be the hero of our story. How can you not be inspired by this? And now, how does she decide to wake up from her hibernation? No, it wasn't because her friend might you know, die or something, or everyone else practically BEGGING her to speak out to them, or Inaban eating her insults for breakfast and then proceeding to be the nicest person to her. It was because she remembered that fucking Taichi, the Ghandi of this anime, told her that he loves the original Nagase or something despite the fact that he had already made that clear like, I don't know, fifty times? Okay, bitch time is over, let's be friends everyone! (Nagase then became friends with everyone). Case in point... why the fuck did all this have to happen in the first place? No reason whatsoever. They just wanted to make Nagase a bitch, and so they made her. There was no such thing as a real personality ever shown to us. She just hid it forever, and maybe revealed it in the end? Although I don't know how much that varied from her previous one... it's just a mess. Nagase could become a much deeper character and one with greater meaning. Her breakdown in the classroom with Taichi and Iori was amazing, and given a better choice of words and script, this could be a truly original and groundbreaking character. But instead of that, they decided to just make her a bitch. God damn it Taichi, you had one job creating this world! At the end of the day, this was a big waste of my brain cells. Apologies for that big rant but god, did I get mad watching the final act... Then we get to Inaban. Hands down my favorite character of this anime, for the simple reason of being blessed with common sense, which apparently is a rare idiosyncrasy in the world of this anime. But the best thing about Inaban isn't just her rationality, but the fact that she weaponizes it into aggressiveness. Making those who shouldn't speak shut it, sharp and grounded to logic when everyone else has the intelligence equivalent to that of melons, Inaban surely made me appreciate a character in an otherwise retarded cast. Inaban's confrontations are at the right times realistic and serious, while others can play more on the comedic side. She's really the reason I kept watching the anime up to at least the fourth chapter. When someone says something stupid, she roasts them. When someone does something stupid, she roasts them. It's really great because this also happens quite often. Basically the alpha female of the squad, and not the bark and no bite type: this can be clearly seen in the fourth chapter when she encounters the dudes. She's just epic. However, there were two issues with Inaban, and honestly, they are so out of character that I almost refuse to believe they're part of her character. First is the aforementioned "problem" of Inaban that I already explained thoroughly. It doesn't really become a problem because it is solved rather quickly. Then we have the romance she is involved in. And it just made me ask the same question as I did with her first issue... why? We learn somewhere in the middle to end of this anime that she is in love with someone. And oh boy, would you guess it? Jesus fucking Taichi! This pops out of nowhere with zero, and I mean it in one hundred percent of the term, absolutely ZERO previous hints or romantic interactions. I mean, it only got revealed to us by Inaban saying it herself and not prior to that. I just can't stress it enough, there were zero signs in the entire anime. Literally Heartbeat had to force her to concern herself with that issue, as if she had forgot it or something: "Yooo Inaban, what ya got there? A secret, huh? Mind if I tell it to the viewers while you say nothing?", like, come on... And while we're at it, let's not forget a similar problem, the relationship between Taichi and Nagase: it is completely naked, it has no foundations. We get no clues, no development, they just decided to throw it in there and then call it a love triangle. It just sucks, you never see the romantic side of any of the characters. Literally any of the characters. Even Aoki is just a walking erection that constantly says that he loves Yui, but really... nothing other than that happens. That pretty much sums up the romance in this anime. And just like that, the roasting beast we once knew as Inaban turned into a cute puppy by our lord and savior Taichi. Quite expected to be honest. And then finally we get to Heartbeat. This character is just... bruh. Quick hint to save you from mental breakdown: do not ever, EVER take this character seriously. It is obviously trolling both our cast and the viewers, intentionally or unintentionally so. But for the sake of this review, let's just try and consider him as a legitimate character. Firstly, even though he is "the villain" of this scenario, his described motive is pathetically elaborated. Any time we try to get some kind of utter motive for the tampering of our cast, we get a very specific answer: "Uhhhhhhhhh... bruuuuuuuuuuuhhhhh", which roughly translates into "you are interesting". And then you begin to ask: what does he mean by interesting? Is this some kind of experiment? If so why on kids? And plenty of similar questions, that never get answered. Eventually, you give up because he gives zero fucks whether or not you want to know why this happens or who he is. He just acts like a zombie, says "bruh" all the time, announces details of the current phenomenon, and proceeds to play with our characters. And I say play with our characters because Heartbeat has incredible powers when you think about it. He can expertly manipulate humans in that he can enter their bodies, swap their bodies, understand their desires and unconditionally spread them to others. He can also possibly read minds, which should make no surprise. He knew, for example, that Inaban loves Taichi without any social cues present (at least in front of us). This might imply that he can predict and even manipulate the future. Now Taichi finally got some real competition. Even so, we get no explanation as to what kind of god he is, why he does what he does, or any of that, as mentioned. But later on in the show, we see him personally approach each character and giving them advice on how to progress with some of their problems... why? He could just manipulate them as he pleased, coming to them in person and giving advice shouldn't be so practical... I mean, if he can read people to the point of comprehending their deepest desires, he can possibly predict the responses of our characters to his questions. In that sense, there's no even point in making them. And to add another hole, after a while he starts classifying characters as "not so interesting as I had expected". How can he expect something incorrectly when he knows what they'll do before they've even done it? This character becomes such a complicated mess of holes and unexplained motives... so now you get the "retarded villain" comment at the beginning. And you'll be sure he is when I add this final nail in the coffin. Here is where our disaster called drama comes into play. The first major dramatic scene is when Heartbeat takes control of Nagase and throws her body into a river. She is hospitalized, and while her friends are out of the operating room, Heartbeat arrives there to tell them that she's going to die. Then he makes an offer: someone can give their body to Nagase, and in exchange, he or she will die in her body on the hospital bed. Eventually, however, no one does. Now this could certainly be a revealing moment for our characters and make the situation actually enlightening, if it wasn't for two things: first, there was no motive to kill Nagase. She just yeeted her body into the river for the funzies. So the only reason I could think for Nagase's death is so Heartbeat can see everyone's reactions in a true goofy Disney villain fashion. Other than that I really can't think of anything else. Anyway, nobody should care at this point. But here's where it gets better! Heartbeat also gave Nagase the opportunity to convey her final thoughts to her friends, by swapping bodies with others temporarily. And we do not see all of it, but after our characters share with her their pain and sadness, after Taichi confesses his love and gets his first and final kiss with her, Nagase goes on to say goodbye to the world... Only for Heartbeat to FUCKING TROLL EVERYONE! Nagase is ALIVE bitches, did it feel good? OF COURSE IT DID! Do you feel awkward as fuck because you told her things you thought she'd take in her grave? TOO BAD! Were you prepared for a sad moment full of character growth and redemption? WRONG ANIME! Oh, and after he does what he does, he fucking APOLOGIZES for it. You heard that right, he apologizes and offers fucking donuts to express his regret... how can you not laugh at that?! And when you thought idiocracy has its limits, we later get the same antic AGAIN, A SECOND TIME!!! This time, he comes to Inaban to tell her "Uhhhhhhhhh hey i think taichi is dead? yeah i think he fell. maybe go check???.... i think he dead tho". Needless to say, no ordinary viewer would believe it a second time, but sadly our alpha female Inaban got baited. Thinking that Taichi fell off a cliff, she ran like crazy with tears in her eyes, only to find that Taichi... fell off a tree. And he was doing what you'd normally expect Taichi to do, yet another Herculean task: saving a poor soul of a cat while putting his life at immense risk. What a hero. What a Legend. That's why we all love Him. Now... even by pretending that Heartbeat cannot predict the actions of our characters, and instead lies to them to see their true reactions to these events, what do we as viewers get from all this? Here's what we get: absolutely NOTHING! The anime sets up dramatic scenes that eventually end up being memes from Heartbeat, so what do we get? A big fucking slap in the face, that's what. Characters stay the same, the course of the show doesn't change, and we get no exposure to ideas or meaningful lessons. Oh, maybe we learn that we shouldn't trust our hobo-looking teachers who can teleport to our houses and tell us what to do. Thanks! And I never said we should always learn something from anime. Maybe we can, you know, simply enjoy them for what they are. Well in that case, have fun with a banquet of lies addressed specifically to you, dear viewer. Oops! I meant flowers. Here, a compensatory gift with even more lies. In my most reasonable assumption, I can only see Heartbeat as a disgrace of an excuse to trigger events in our story, in lack of coming up with other, more clever means. A product of lazy, poor, and distasteful writing. And if you didn't agree with me so far, maybe you will when you meet the second Heartbeat. Yeah, there is a second fucker! Why? I don't know! And I'm dead sure even the writer doesn't at this point. So... these were the two main dramatic sequences of the anime. I'm certain you're still weeping. The rest of the drama in this show goes as far as brief banter between each other for minuscule reasons. In other words, this anime is devoid of meaningful drama. After this abnormally huge review for such an anime, I have only this to say: This anime ended up boring and fucking irritating. I have clearly specified the reasons, and as much as I love Inaban, she alone couldn't save the anime. Just pathetic attempts to create drama, characters were either blank sheets of paper or car crashes and having literally only sex in their heads. An additional troll robbing the anime of any sort of serious plot development, and a big inequality between the scale of the ideas and the corresponding depth they are given. I believe that with a few tweaks here and there, this could be considerably better, but being what it is, it just left me with a bad taste in the mouth. Really curious as to why so many people praise this anime in reviews.