Hakuoki

Hakuouki:  C+

I didn't really think of a rating for this show until just now when I started writing it.  It's interesting, well-animated and romantic, but not particularly well-written, and the characters are predictable.  It was shown in two seasons, "Hakuouki - Shinsengumi Kitan" and "Hakuouki - Hekketsu-roku".

Hakuouki was originally an "Otome Game," sometimes called a "Reverse Harem," a game built around a single female protagonist choosing a male protagonist to pursue.  Having no experience whatsoever of these, I was interested in the concept at the start, Hakuouki in particular focuses on the Shinsengumi, a famous group of Special Police samurai in service to the Tokugawa Shogunate during the Meiji restoration (for those of you who don't know your Japanese History, that's the losing side), with a fictional female protagonist, Yukimura Chizuru, a girl who is taken in by the Shinsengumi after witnessing a scene of the Shinsengumi purging members of their own ranks.  If this sounds rather dark, it's because it is, the Shinsengumi's reputation at the time was extremely negative, and given their status as an elite group that ultimately is defeated and torn apart, modern fiction has treated them as both villainous and heroic, depending on the story.  Hakuouki treats them as mostly heroic, but blurs the line in a few cases.

The series is difficult to classify because while it is ostensibly a shojo series, it's incredibly bloody with a high body count, and is extremely historically accurate, though obviously the entire 'demon' subplot surrounding Chizuru, her father, and the Shinsengumi's secret 'medicine' is fictional, most of the characters and their ultimate fates are pretty much exactly as history told them.

The series manages to be pure and romantic, though I couldn't shake the feeling while watching it that it was originally the feverish writing of a middle-aged history buff woman who was creating an author insert as a pretty young girl who circumstance demanded be surrounded by these famous men, who conveniently found her attractive and flirted with her in one way or another.  It's been polished into a very functional story with quite a bit of depth, and it's kind of refreshing to see that the reverse harem has the same set of familiar faces as the normal version (the glasses boy, the young one, the musclehead, the proper samurai, the quiet one, etc).

The series is almost completely fan-serviceless (though there is a bit of MAN SERVICE), with the exception of a couple of extremely tasteful and beautiful scenes involving drinking blood out of our girl's neck.  So that's nice too.

Overall Hakuouki is a pretty solid series, but, like so many series that I like but don't love, it lacks brilliance.  If you want to see a nice piece of tragic historical fiction peppered with romance and samurai violence, Hakuouki is competent period piece.  If you're starved for stellar writing or happy endings, though, Hakuouki will leave you unfulfilled.