Love, Election and Chocolate : Full Review

Visual Novel adaptions always seem very difficult, and very rarely do I feel like they actually succeed in the end. The challenges facing them is just far too great. You have a long game, in this case 36 hours average according to VNDB, with a large variety of possible romance options and routes to take. And each route will further the story in unique and interesting ways, that are generally always important to the overall plot and story of the game. And in some cases they manage to make it work, maybe they focus on just a single character or pick the true ending route to adapt, or maybe give each romance option just 2 or 3 episodes so every route gets adapted. But unfortunately, whatever they tried to do for this show I don’t think worked at all.

And honestly I don’t know if this is so much the fault of the adaption, or a just a very seemingly strange story from the source VN. Sure the anime has many issues, the characters are good and enjoyable sure. But the actual character routes are pretty messy, and you have characters who have hours worth of development change in the course of minutes, or between episodes for real no reason. Outside of them needing to change to fit the next scene from the VN. And the romance that they finally choose to go with has any real development delayed very late into the show, and by the time it happens it doesn’t really feel like it fits or makes all that much sense. Character motivations and backgrounds also ends up being really rough and cut completely or chopped up to allow it to fit the 12 episode count the show had. But I’d say in the end I enjoyed the characters enough, and that I don’t really have any complaints about the characters.

My main complaint, or rather confusion maybe, is in regards to the actual plot of the show. For the first half of the show say, the plot is very simple and easy to understand. Sure it is silly and ridiculous, a club is trying to get somebody to become the next Student Council president in order to make sure their club doesn’t have their budget cut. And it is filled with all the silly events that you would expect, and you never feel like it is missing all that much content that was important. Nothing major was cut is the feeling I’m getting at this point.

And than it all changes. Suddenly this school has secret service members who protect important people from unknown threats, you have an organization that has spies around the school monitoring people, you have students attempting to murder other students to hide secrets and maintain power, and people are getting kidnapped and threatened. And honestly I don’t think any of this was nearly foreshadowed enough to suddenly start occurring in the second half of the show. You have events happening that don’t match the silly school setting they have previously created. And the only thing I can think of, is this was supposed to be something very different. in some different version of this story this was a completely different setting. With completely different characters and tone. And for whatever reason they changed the story’s setting to be a school.

In the end, I wonder what type of story and character development exists in the VN. I can’t imagine that the VN feels so sudden or surprising when various events end up happening. But the only way I could know for sure is to play the VN and see for myself, and I can’t say I’m not tempted simply to see how it goes.