The World of Narue : My Review

My Rating

The World of Narue. First seen in japan in 2003, The world of narue is a 12 episode high school sci-fi romance. For the US release, the entire series comes in one box set with lots of extra features. The story follows Kazuto a young good guy type who falls for a fellow classmate. The girl he falls for is a bit of an outcast. Narue Nanase just happens to be the product of a human and alien birth. Other characters mostly come into the story as friends. Maruo is a classmate who gives dating advice to Kazuto. Yagi is an obsessive schoolgirl bent on proving Narue isn’t really an alien. As the story starts to lose interest a few typical anime girls types get introduced to spice things up. Narue’s older younger sister and a few others give the show just a dash of classic harem anime style.

What’s to like about the world of narue? Well the artwork isn’t bad at least not from a technical standpoint. The voice acting doesn’t make you want to kill yourself. Narue is certainly something you could watch with kids around. Thats about all I could come up with…

While the artwork was farily well drawn, it lacks something. Its not so much quality that it lacks as it is subject. You can draw a great picture of a cat, but in the end its still just a picture of a cat. With Narue’s boasting as a Sci-Fi Romantic Comedy the art decidedly missed putting anything too Sci-Fi or too Romantic into the animation. Don’t expect any revoulutionary new ideas here.

The world of narue is definately sweet and romantic. Therein lies the problem, at least for me. If you are at all familiar with reading my reviews, you will know that cute and cuddly ain’t my thing. Puppy dogs and children hugging have thier place. That place just isn’t at the center of a truly great anime series.

While the voice acting certainly fits the characters, what the characters have to say doesn’t bring much to the table. Narue suffers the same fate as almost every disney cartoon movie ever made. Its so horribly predictable that there just isn’t anything to look foreward to. Prince meets Princess, they get separated by obstacle, obstacle overcome, happily ever after, the end! There may be a few good gags to keep things interesting along the way but ultimately you set down to the movie already knowing what is going to happen.

As an overall rating I have to give narue a below average rating. There isn’t anything broken and production value seems good so I can’t beat it up too harshly. I wouldn’t reccomend it to my friends, but thats mostly because I make friends with people who like their anime a little more on the grown up side. Its not bad enough that I would try to talk someone out of buying the world of Narue, but if they asked me I probably wouldn’t reccomend it. (unless it was a teenage girl who is really into cuddly cute things) As far as rent vs buy goes if your going to get it, rent it.