To Love Ru is a 26 episode anime based upon the manga series. After the first season, there are also six OVAs that was released that continued on to help bridge the gap into the second season. This is a harem ecchi comedy anime, and the emphasis is on the ecchi. It follows teenager Yuuki Rito, who is your everyday normal student. He has a crush on Sairenji Haruna but every attempt he had made to try and confess to her over the years has failed due to some random reason or another. Anyway, on yet another attempt, a spaceship turns up and crashes down right before him. The world just ignores that and goes back to their lives.
That night when Rito was bathing, a naked girl suddenly appears in front of him and we’re introduced to Lala Satalin Deviluke. A few accidents later and we learn that Lala has run away from home, she is being chased, and Rito has inadvertently proposed to Lala, who accepted and they are now engaged. Thus begins Rito’s life as a harem protagonist, being every guy’s envy.
The season shows the everyday life of Rito living with Lala. Lala’s pretty clueless with human life, as can be expected, and she does the oddest of things. These normally involve Rito in some way, and he will somehow end in up awkward positions with all of the female characters. Most of the humor comes from this, and it is the type of humor that’s stock standard in this genre. It’s the bread and butter of the show but there are plenty of times where it feels like the writers are trying too hard. For every good scene there is a cringeworthy one where it felt out of place. There are times where it is blatantly stretching out the runtime. Everything is highly exaggerated, so it can get to a case of apathy since it doesn’t surprise anymore.
From time to time, suitors come to Earth in order to find out who the fiancé of the Princess of Deviluke is. This isn’t the focus though but is just there in the background. Lala is such an airheaded that you can’t really dislike her. Despite her cheerful attitude, naivety and overall niceness, she is powerful and can dish out the damage when she feels like it. Her inventions are usually useless; it’s her physical strength that is a surprise. As the season progresses, the cast gets bigger and bigger. Every female character is a potential candidate for Rito who just seems to be a magnet for this type of thing, despite not really having anything special about him. Impressively, Rito convinces himself to remain steadfast to Haruna but you can see that he is wavering. Characters are introduced at a rapid rate, nearly a new one per episode, so the cast soon gets unwieldy.
For every good scene or something gives a sense of progression, there are two or three more that are bland and boring. Considering we only get around four or five episodes before the filler type of episodes start to invade the season, it can be hard to sit through. You have to sit through three or four of these types of episodes before it bring in one where it is actually relevant.
There are so many times in the season where things don’t make sense. As you wonder where an episode is heading toward and how it will end, it turns out the writers don’t know either as they just cut to the credits in the middle of something. It becomes worse and worse as the season progresses, including dedicating a whole episode on an in-universe TV show that has no logic or any idea what it is trying to do. Considering the source material had plenty of content and frankly, much better scenarios, it makes you wonder why they had to add in all this fluff and rubbish.
The final few episodes are terrible with hardly any enjoyment able to be gathered. The season finale is supposed to be a massive climax, and the culmination of all the “friendships” that Rito had gathered. Instead, it stretches it out to two episodes with not enough content to actually fill it (pretty much like the rest of the season). There are some extremely cheesy moments and by the end of the season, you feel like very little was accomplished in 26 episodes.
The OVAs end up redeeming the series as they are actually more faithfully based on the manga and thus a lot more interesting and funny. Unfortunately, because the first season wasted so much of its time not adapting things, the OVAs end up skipping ahead and you’ll be lost at what has happened to several characters. Oshizu suddenly is attending school, Celine randomly appears from an OVA onwards and Run is a pop idol, the OVAs make no effort to try and ease you in. There is also the change in aesthetics, where characters are animated in more cutesy proportions, which will definitely take some getting used to. The proportions evolve as the OVAs go, finally settling down to something that’s a nice hybrid between the two styles.
The OVAs continue to improve and it leads to some fun episodes. Although it is at this point that it also starts showing off repetitive moments. The female cast will always reveal themselves accidentally to Rito, who will always faint or be put in some awkward position. It’s funny the first few times but when it does it several times in each episode, it is tiring. As it transitions to a format where each episode is comprised of three shorts, there is no filler anymore.
Overall, To Love Ru has a terrible first season. It is boring, bland and filled with filler. It actually started off fairly decent, with some laughs and interesting characters but the rot soon settled in and it never recovered. The six OVAs helps redeems the show but unfortunately, it also skips way too far ahead with a lot of characters / elements randomly pop up as if they were always there, which can make it very confusing. Nevertheless, it gives hope for the next season as the OVAs were enjoyable and genuinely funny.
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