Shuffle!

Shuffle!: B

I first heard of Shuffle! (yes the exclamation point is part of the title) when I was looking at the tropes page for "star making role", and checking out some of my favorite voice actors, in this case Ms. Yuko Goto.  Seeing as it was considered more important for her career than the later and much better-known Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, I determined it was probably worth watching.

Initial impressions were pretty meh.  Our main character, Rin, lives with his childhood friend Kaede (voiced by Goto), the same age as he is, who is also exceptionally devoted to taking care of him and plainly attracted to him.  It's revealed with little fanfare that in this world, demons and gods live side-by-side with humanity, after the opening of the gateway between the three planes ten years ago.  The first episode kicks the series off by revealing that, some eight years previous, a young Rin won the hearts of the daughters of the lord of the Gods and the lord of the Demons, and now they'll be transferring to his school, moving in next door to him and won't he please pick one and marry her?

It sounds contrived and frankly weak, and I was extremely skeptical of the series' overall quality, but I kept watching, and the characters developed.  The cast remains fairly stable in size, time is taken to increase depth rather than breadth, and as the series begins delving into histories which, while often fantastic, are not without merit as the series becomes an evolving discussion of how a group of girls who were all friends and all liked the same boy would behave.  The series also strictly avoids having a single obvious "main girl" who's destined to win Rin's heart, which, combined with the series' willingness to have the girls in question gain and lose ground in the "race," actually makes for a compelling story of love, rejection and friendship in adversity.

It's not a supremely realistic treatment of the subject matter, but it's definitely much more interesting than most other harem series I've seen, which retain a strict status quo and a protagonist who is, for whatever reason, uninterested in actually advancing his relationships with the female cast.

And, as promised, Yuko Goto's character Kaede ultimately delivers an amazing performance in the later episodes, as her inner demons are finally faced.

If you're not interested in fan servicey harem anime, go ahead and skip it and you won't miss out, but if you're interested in a relatively intelligent and well-crafted look at the genre, you could do a lot worse than Shuffle!.

Final Note:  There's a compilation OVA series, called "Shuffle! Memories" which I didn't watch, except for the last episode (which is an omake Fan Service episode), but as I understand is primarily a much shorter, re-cut version of the original series, and can probably safely be skipped.