Finale: Toradora!
I remember that before Toradora started airing, the general opinion of it was “I liked it better when it was called Zero no Tsukaima”. Here, we are presented with yet another show featuring a Kugimiya Rie tsundere lead, with the fact that she is violent written right into her character. Ryuuji’s description didn’t seem to be much more than the typical useless male lead. It wasn’t hard to extrapolate what would happen by the end based on the title and the premise, that they’re try to help each other get together with the other’s best friend.
Clearly, it turned out to be more than everyone’s worst fears. How did Toradora manage to fight against all odds and end up being something good? It had interesting characters and they all worked together pretty well. Most of them managed to not get stuck into the same characters we’ve seen before.
Taiga managed to drop the most of the overt violence pretty early. Ryuuji turned out to be not useless and amusingly OCD. Ami was an awesome surprise, often showing up to dispense her sarcastic and insightful opinion. Kitamura was pretty typical except for the weird crap that he does. Interestingly enough, I’d say that it’s probably Minori who was the closest to what people predicted she’d be: the girl who seems to be ‘lol so random’ and suppresses what she’s really feeling.
That’s not to say Toradora went off without a hitch. There were points that I thought were stupid, but those managed to be saved not too long afterward by something great happening. There was some criticism of the more ‘emo’ parts, but I didn’t really mind those. It’s not like I was expecting everything to be hilarious all the time.
The part that bugged me the most was everything that happened in episode 24. This seemed to be part in which the pacing was the worst and basically left everyone going ‘what’. There were points before where I found the pacing really weird and I know that there’s been a lot of discussion over what JC Staff has cut. I’ve come up with the theory that JC Staff doesn’t understand the concept of time, which explains such adaptations as Nodame Cantabile Paris Chapter, the last few episodes of Toradora, and Shakugan no Shana Second.
Despite all of that though, the way Toradora ended satisfied me well enough. I really liked the characters and it’s certainly fared better than most adaptations, especially with the coordination of the ending with the light novel. I don’t think there’s anything quite like it. Would I tell people to check it out? Definitely.