Tripping and falling onto blu-ray once again from Sentai Filmworks is the seminal (heh) ecchi comedy series To Love Ru, this time collecting all four previously released seasons into one big package (heh heh) for a grand total of a whopping 64 episodes. It’s time to grab your interstellar betrothed and stumble into something soft and warm. Then probably get punched through a wall or something. You know how it goes…
Regular Joe high school student Rito Yuki is enamored with a classmate Haruna Sairenji but lacks the confidence to confess his feelings to her. Secretly Haruna likes Rito too, so it seems natural that all in due time they would wind up together happily ever after. Except this is a harem anime, so everything starts to go bananas when Rito accidentally becomes engaged to a naked alien princess named Lala (this guy seems to be the kind of extremely horny misunderstandings). To add to the mix is Yaki, the Golden Darkness, a super powerful weapon that also happens to be a cute-yellowed hair girl that hates perverts. There’s also Run, the two-gendered alien that switched from boy to girl with a sneeze. The girl side becomes a pop idol and also develops a crush on Yuki. Then of course there’s the stern class representative that secretly begins to like him. Whether Rito’s soaking in hot springs at the center of the earth, dealing with Lala’s diminutive but extremely threatening father, dealing with rawkus out of work aliens disturbing a ghost’s sleep or running an inn for outer space visitors that breaks out into a space war, he always finds a way to stumble head first into the boobs or crotch of one of the many lovely ladies in his life. And all that is just the first season! In season two, we meet Lala’s younger twin sisters Momo and Nana who bring a whole new set of troubles to Rito’s already complicated life. Momo in particular seems to always end up caught in Rito’s bed at the most inopportune moments. Season three and four (called To Love Ru Darkness) brings further problems into Rito’s life. We begin to understand more of Yami’s role as a weapon as we are introduced to her younger “sister” Mea and their “master” who seeks to bring a lot of chaos and destruction into the lives of Rito and all he holds dear. Amidst all that we still have the usual perverted hijinks, kicked into even higher gear with the ever meddling Momo and her Project Harem initiative to bring every girl in Rito’s life into one big happy “family”.
I can imagine the pitch meeting for To Love Ru went something like this:
“Imagine Urusei Yatsura BUT HORNIER.”
That’s pretty much To Love Ru in a nutshell. It has basically the same premise of a guy with a crush on a local girl who inadvertently ends up engaged to an alien and strikes a similar wacky comedic tone. Except To Love Ru goes MUCH further with its ecchi content, bordering on hentai at times. Still, it’s hard to hate this show. Like Urusei Yatsura, it has a kind of goofy, freewheeling affability to it while also being complete shameless with its pervertedness. The first two seasons especially remain generally very light-hearted with only the last couple of episodes of the first season introducing any kind of conflict at all. Season three and four definitely ups the stakes more and the final few episodes of the fourth season gets downright serious at times even though it culminates in an incredibly silly but wholly appropriate climax to the tone of the show. So I guess the question is, is this a good series? Objectively probably not, the sheer number of ridiculous coincidences and the constant tripping and stumbling of Rito ending up in one perverted situation after another gives it a preposterousness and predictability to it that doesn’t exactly scream great or nuanced writing. Still, it’s kinda like dumping ice cream on a pop tart. Yea, it’s total trash and you really shouldn’t be near it, but sometimes you just can’t help yourself.
On the technical side, it seems as though Sentai has basically ported over the transfers from previous releases with the first season only getting a 1080i transfer while the other three seasons are all provided in 1080p. Would it have been nice to get the first season remastered too? Sure, but it still looks clean and unobtrusive. On the audio front we have the original Japanese stereo track as well as a new English dub done just for this release, also in stereo. I do wonder why they didn’t go the 5.1 route here. Some of the episodes, especially in season four could’ve benefitted from a bolder audio mix, but it’s still fine for what it is.
The extras here are rather disappointing only including the usual clean OP and ED animations. This is the one area that I really feel like Sentai dropped the ball. Not included in this “complete series” are 16 whole episodes, as three OVA series released after the first, third and fourth seasons. Often these side OVAs are just more fluff and rarely contribute to the plot, but this is one occasion where especially the first OVA series is truly missed, as it introduces several plot points and characters that come up in later seasons. This is where Lala’s younger sisters first make their appearance for instance (they basically are already living with Rito and Lala at the beginning of season 2 with no intro as to why they’re there). There also exists a summary episode released after season 4 but that one is more understandable as to why it wasn’t included. I really do hope these other 16 episodes make it to blu-ray in the US at some point, otherwise fans of this series will be forced to watch them on some shady pirate website.
Overall, while I wouldn’t recommend this series to those looking for something a little more serious or chaste, To Love Ru is exactly the kind of light, frothy show that goes down easy and offers a pleasant diversion from the more complex, sprawling shonen anime flooding the shelves at the moment. Especially if you’re a fan of ecchi comedies in the vein of Urusei Yatsura and High School DxD, you might want to check this one out.