Nisekoi: False Love Season 2 starts with Chitoge mulling over her romantic feelings for Raku despite their relationship being a pretence for the sake of appearances. She struggles with these feelings and whether or not she wants to explore them further or even tell Raku about them.
This makes up the first episode, and based on that, it would be easy to expect that questions about the central relationship of the anime would dominate the series. In fact season 2 all but ignores it for most of the episodes. The first few episodes build on what has come before, but around the mid-point the show promptly forgets about it. The titular false love isn’t really a factor again after this until the last episode. In the space in-between, Chitoge is almost phased out completely as a character. Raku spends more time with Haru and Kosaki in these episodes than anyone else. In these episodes Raku’s supposed relationship with Chitoge seems to be nothing more than a plot point, and one that is easily forgotten by the show itself.
This diversion does have the benefit of making Nisekoi feel less like an inevitable ‘Will they? Won’t they?’ situation between its leads, but it also makes it feel less focused. It doesn’t seem to be about more than putting its characters in typical high school situations and letting them interact with each other. Well apart from an awkwardly placed OVA in which three of the characters are magical girls and the animators have way too much fun with the old joke that magical girls are naked in transformation sequences. Unlike other OVAS which act as bonus features in their respective DVDs, this one is tacked on to an episode, and as a result it makes no sense.
Alongside the aforementioned flaws the show is also repetitive. Raku’s and Chitoge’s scenes together usually boil down to her trying to hint at how she feels, him not getting it, and her hitting him for being oblivious. Raku’s scenes with Haru don’t quite share this problem, and there is something of a progression to their interactions but a lot of the scenes in the process are much of the same. She gets annoyed at him, he does something to try to refute her perception of him, she decides it proves that she was right all along.
Nisekoi is capable of charming, heartfelt or hilarious moments. A few of the episodes even work to telling something of a decent high school romance. Its prime issues lie in its lack of focus or idea of what story exactly it’s telling. When the titular False Romance takes centre stage again it almost feels like an afterthought, not something that builds on the series and by the end it hasn’t developed any further.
NISEKOI SEASON 2 / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: AKIYUKI SHINBO / WRITERS: VARIOUS / STARRING: KANA HANAZAWA, KOUKI UCHIYAMA, NAO T YAMA, AYANE SAKURA, KANA ASUMI / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
