Anime Review: "Don't Toy With Me Miss Nagatoro" Season #1

 

I’m finishing Nagatoro season 2 right now and realizing I haven’t reviewed season 1 yet, so here we go.

Adaptation rating. Very Good.

Voice acting was great. Sumire Uesaka (Nagatoro) does a fantastic job with all of her characters and she’s certainly a great Nagatoro. Daiki Yamashita plays Senpai a little too weak for my tastes, ends up channeling early My Hero Deku… I’m not sure I had senpai pegged as being quite that soft, but I suppose it works.

The music was good. OP ED were fine, but not really the kind of songs I’d buy to play in the car.

The animation of the cute, wiggly bits, certainly worked great.

That being said, there’s a couple reasons why I score this one pretty low as a series (low for me at least, romcom's are usually an easy 10/10). Though I eventually turned into a Nagatoro fan after buying the manga, the first season of the anime didn’t really help me with that. I think this series as a whole gets better as things go and season 2 was definitely an improvement.

I found the male MC to be excessively wimpy in the beginning. In this season his wimpy-factor gets played up even more than in the manga, which is… *ugh*. In contrast, Nagatoro starts off as too much of a sadist. I understand in the original prototype for this series Nagatoro was MUCH more sadistic, even going so far as to torture senpai with not a single hint of flirting. The first stages of the series still had too much of this essence and it took too long for it to go away.

But, things do get better, much better in fact.

Nagatoro’s friends are pretty hilarious and drive her to be more territorial protecting Senpai so that only she can tease him. Then you throw in the senpai of senpai from the art club and now you’ve got a force pushing them together on the romantic front too.

For me the highlight of this season was the last few episodes. Nekotaro arc and the school festival art contest were pretty incredible.