Hello everyone,
Let's go with another review, of a series I watched a lot of time ago named Strawberry Panic based over some short stories by Sakurako Kimino.
Let's start with a synopsis :
Nagisa Aoi is a first year high school student who has been sent to the Astraea Dormitory after her parents are transferred abroad. The dormitory houses girls from three different girls' schools: St. Spica's Academy, St. Le Rim Girls School and St. Miatre Girls Academy. There she meets the representative of the three girls' schools, Shizuma Hanazano, also know as the Etoile, who is beloved by all students at all schools. The two of them have an interesting first encounter and Hanazano seems to take an instant liking for Aoi.
Oh, this story reeks of Yuri starting from the synopsis and each and every episode have great, or well massive quantity of yuri focus and interaction.
The story follows the classic of the Yuri genre with a girl transferring into a new all-girls school and she find herself wanted by many different girls, drama ensues and the story progress.
The particularity of this series is that there are a couple of plot to follow depending on the main character that may be Nagisa Aoi in the main one, but also Hikari in another and so on.
The drama stories are sometimes very cheesy/predictable and turn to be quite annoying for me, the comedy part is instead very well done and I found myself laughing a lot of times watching. (Especially when the Lulim students are involved)
The characters are many, most of them will remain forgotten (especially the minor one), but a decent focus is given to a couple of the main one so you can relate with their story somehow. (even if some stories are totally meh for me) There is some growth in the series even thought the characters remain mostly monodimensional.
My favourite character is Chikaru Minamoto for her incredible cute, energetic and my-pace personality, she's most likely the less insane character in the whole story to be honest.
I deeply hate Shizuma Hanazono, be it for the "ojou-sama" spiky look they've used in the anime (in the novels she's a lot cuter), be it for her damn hateful personality and behaviour. Don't know for sure.
The graphical quality is top notch for the time and I generally liked most of the girls design in the story except for Shizuma's one. The animation is good even if with some little problem here and there.
The sound quality is also top notch with many great seiyuu working on this project like Ai Shimizu in Tamao Suzumi's role, Mai Nakahara in Nagisa Aoi's role, Chiwa Satou in Chiyo Tsukidate's role, etc...
What can I add? This series is solid and is suggest to anyone looking for a new yuri series with plenty of drama in it to watch.
If you can't stand pointless drama, stay away from this title!
See you soon,
feal87