Sakura Diaries #1

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90 minutes
English/Japanese
English Subtitles
08/08/2000

And thusly Christmas break has begun in full. Never seeing the light of day is the plan and I have no problem accomplishing such a feat. Going to bed at five or six in the morning and waking up two hours later just as the night is beginning, nothing wrong with that. Then there's just a scant hour or two to blow on fun filled things such as Metroid Prime and reviews for you before the phone calls start coming in and we go for another night of revelry with the old crew. Do I miss my buddies at college? Of course, but nothing can compare to times spent with Greg, Andrew and the rest of the bunch. And Christmas means very special presents for you as well. Presents in the form of re-reviews of "classics" such as these that I put out over two years ago when the site was just beginning. Merry Christmas, and as the little crippled boy said so long ago, god bless us everyone. But god's left a little more on the side for longtime readers of fan-service.com

I remember watching Sakura Diaries a long time ago, and finding that it was surprisingly better than what I expected. That's not to say it was pants ruining good. Bearable is probably a better term to describe it.

Touma Inaba has got a bit of a problem. He desperately wants to get out of his hick town and start a new life. The only problem is to do that he needs to pass his college entrance exams, and he's not the brightest pea in the pod, if you catch my drift. To complicate matters further he's an eighteen year old virgin, a fate I'd wish on no one but my worst enemy (Hi Leon!**) and his first night in Tokyo is plauged by an embarassing set of circumstances involving a high school call girl and the hotel porn channel. He manages to catch a cold and do so bad on his entrance exams that he's shipped right back to Izu without a second thought. And to make matters worse it seems like the cute call girl he so bruskly pushed away is following him.

Now, I can sympathize with Touma. We both got hit a few times with the stupid stick and we both have to deal with girls stalking us. The problem is the chick who's stalking him is freakin' hot as hell and an excellent cook to boot. Now, I usually get the girls who can cook well...but I can honestly say they're nowhere near as attractive as the redheaded Urara.

Unforunately (or perhaps fortunately if you happen to live in Japan) the chick who wants so badly to smoke his sausage is his cousin. I don't know if freaky kind of stuff like that is commonplace in Japan, but this IS the place where middle aged business men buy panties from junior highschool girls without a second though. What I'm saying is there's like, a precedent for this kinda of behavior. As Neal Stephenson said in the excellent book that I've never read, Japan is a culture well accustomed to sexual deviancy.
To make matters even worse Touma hooks up with a girl straight out of every Japanese man's repressed sexual fantasies. Tall, leggy, and big chested. Let me tell you, if this girl wasn't made up of painted plastic flipped really fast I'd be feeding her a very special Christmas dinner, if you get my drift. Mieko plays him like the classic sucker, but she seems so innocent doing it that it's hard not to like her in a way. Giving him fake numbers, only talking to him when she needs to escape from the fat perverts trying to ease their way up her perilously short skirt.

So he's caught between the barely pubescent and incetous minded Urara on one side, and the ultra-sexy manipulating Mieko on the other. The situations that ensue were so embarassing that I turned the sound down on my stereo so my neighbors wouldn't know what kind of perverted semi-hentai stuff I was watching. As far as romantic animes go, this one is pretty good. It's very real, and you'll often feel that you've met at least one Mieko or Touma in your lifetime. Or, maybe you're even a Touma yourself. However, Urara is a different story. I've got a sexy cousin over in California but that doesn't mean I'm gonna climb her like Everest. Unfortunately for the young girl, there are just somethings you have to keep OUT of the family...unless you want children with three legs or something. (Though in my case that isn't exactly a deformity, know what I mean?)

The main problems with the discs are on the technical side. The chapter selects suck and the dub is awful. Not to say it isn't well acted, because it's pretty respectable...the problem is they often violate plot worse than a fat chick on my main man Greg. Sakura Diaries is pretty respectable, all things considered, and I did like the overall theme it was going for. Unfortunately it's bogged down by too much nudity and "funny" sexual situations to be considered -really- good. Sakura Diaries tries way too hard, if you ask me...when you're talking about sex in a movie less is ALWAYS more.

**That'll teach you not to give me the hot Eastern European chick's number!