Rumbling Hearts Anime Review

Suzumiya Haruka has waited her entire high school years to admit her feelings to Narumi Takayuki. Suzumiya's friend, Hayase Mizuki, wants to help and so she becomes friends with Narumi so that it would be easier for them to meet each other. After 4 years of high school, Suzumiya tells Narumi how she feels. The two are extremely shy and have awkward moments every time they are near each other. Suzumiya is in tears thinking that Narumi doesn't feel the same way she does towards him. However, after finally getting clearer thoughts, Narumi does like Suzumiya and admits how he feels to her. There are no longer awkward moments as both individuals have mutual feelings towards one another. They spend time during the summer, before studying for college entrance exams, with each other. It has finally become a great relationship when one day a tragic accident leaves one of them in a coma. How will their relationship be affected now that 3 years has passed since the accident, and the patient still has not woken?

Sorry if I made that synopsis of the story sound like a bad soap opera. But really, after struggling through this series, that is all I could think of it as. It really does feel like a soap opera. I understand that it is supposed to be a serious love drama but it just didn't feel like "anime" to me. What I mean is, is that I rarely found it entertaining or enjoyable. Instead I felt that this series was very serious and had realistic relationship problems that just weren't enjoyable to watch. I mean, seriously, who wants to watch an anime where parents fight with each other like in real life? No one. Who wants to watch an anime where there are grueling relationship problems that are hard to sit through? Some people, but not me.

I tried to like this series but I couldn't. I liked how the series started and thought that this was going to be great, but then the "main story" started and I lost interest. So much happens within the first 2 episodes that you start to like the pacing of the series, but then it simply stalls for 10 episodes. For 10 episodes, I struggled watching as not very much happened. Yes, character development occurred, but that is to be expected. There wasn't very entertaining moments, and thinking back on it, there wasn't anything too critical in those episodes. Luckily the ending of this series saved what would have been a total lost for me.

I'll admit that the story was compelling. I think the problem I had with it was the story was simply too dark. There were moments when it tried to force laughter, but those were far from humorous. Like I said, I struggled through episodes. Why? The characters were realistic, had realistic emotions, but sometimes being too realistic creates boredom. I know the series was trying to get the audience to understand what the characters were going through, and it did a great job of that, but I think it did too much of it! It felt as if the middle episodes of the series were repeating things that we already knew about the characters. Had the series kept the pace of the first two episodes, and made this 14 episode series into maybe a 6 episode OVA, then I would enjoy it a lot more. Instead there are many episodes that I felt like ripping my eyes out from boredom, which ultimately destroyed any positive feelings towards this series.

Some of things that I did find positive in this series is that it is a love drama series that is very realistic. If you like that type of genre, then by all means this series is for you. I felt it had a great story, realistic characters, but there was too much boring aspects in it that hurt the overall feel to Rumbling Hearts. The entire relationship problems were very interesting, and something I probably wouldn't have imagined happening unless I watched lots of soap operas where people are typically put into comas every other episode. I might be a bit too hard on this series because it did do a good job of setting a serious tone and interesting story, but it just wasn't entertaining to me. It is hard for me to say positive things about a series that puts a bitter taste in my mouth after watching it.

Of course the animation and music were very good. I believe it was the same hentai artist who made the original game that worked on this anime series, and it turned out beautifully. Everything is animated nicely and you can tell that there weren't any ignored details left out. The character designs were also good. There are basically 4 or 5 main characters and each one has his or her own unique personality, which is very important in these types of love drama series.