Summary:
Motto To Love-Ru is the second full length TV series of the To Love-Ru franchise. However, unlike the first season that premiered in 2008, Motto To Love-Ru will follow an episode format similar to that of the last OVA episode from 2009 where each episode will be composed of three mini-episodes (or at least that's what's shown in the first episode). The show is expected to continue following Hasemi Saki's To Love-Ru manga (to some extent)
Premier Date: October 6, 2010
Episodes: Unknown (most likely 12 or 13
cast:
Same as prequels
Animation: XEBEC
OP Theme: Loop-the-Loop by KOTOKO
ED Theme: Baby Baby Love by Haruka Tomatsu
Opinion:
So after another year, To Love-Ru is back yet again but as a full TV series again. It's hard to tell whether the first episode will be representative of the structure of the rest of the series since the first episode followed a format similar to the last OVA episode. The previews did not provide any further hints unfortunately.
The animation was pretty, but I kinda liked the original style better from the OVAs and the original 2008 TV series. The new style makes it look very Kanokon-like, which I really didn't like since the character designs often looked blurred for some reason. Putting that aside though, XEBEC has taken a step up from their Ladies versus Butler work back in Winter 2010, which is nice since that series was an incredible disappointment.
The music is nice. Not the usual techno-like rhythm I'm used to hearing from KOTOKO, but it's still decent. I guess as time passes, the music from her is beginning to fade sadly (though her visual novel themes continue to be awesome). The ending is catchy as expected from Haruka Tomatsu. A very weird song, but I guess I shouldn't be all that surprised given the awkward amount of themes that To Love-Ru comes up with.
If anything bothered me thus far in this series, it's not the jumpy/inconsistent transitions, but rather the censors. It's one thing about convenient censoring, but I don't see any necessity to be suddenly inserting a white/black bar across the screen. Not only is that very poor/lazy animation, but also very disturbing. Whether or not it's because to "protect minors from what they see on TV" or because of saving time and cost, animation studios really need to find a better alternative because this is just getting more and more ridiculous as time goes on.
All in all, Motto To Love-Ru is looking better than the first TV series at the moment as a whole. I can't say I really enjoyed the first episode, but there were moments (i.e. the Yami-Mikan relationship) where I was actually hoping for something interesting to happen. However, it's nice to see that they're continuing off the OVA to some extent.
Expectation: Low
Preliminary Score: 7/10