My Love Story!! Complete Collection is a three-disc set that includes all 24 episodes of the anime, as well as a couple of bonus features.

My Love Story!! Complete Collection
English Publisher: Sentai Filmworks
Format: Blu-ray
Release Date: December 20, 2016

The main character of My Love Story!! is a boy named Takeo Goda. He’s a very large high school student, but he also has a heart of gold. His neighbor and best friend is Makoto Sunakawa, who’s very popular with girls but always seems to turn them down when they ask him out.

One day, as Takeo and Makoto are taking the train, Takeo notices a guy who looks like he’s grabbing Rinko Yamato’s butt and intervenes. Takeo takes the groper off at the next stop, and Makoto and the girl come with him. When Takeo takes the groper to a nearby police officer, the groper says something offensive to the girl, and Takeo punches him in the face. Unfortunately, this earns Takeo a short-term suspension from school.

This encounter leads Takeo and Rinko to fall in love with each other, but not being able to admit it to the other. In fact, Takeo is under the impression that Rinko is in love with Makoto. But Takeo gets quite the surprise when Makoto tells him that Rinko is in love with Takeo. After the misunderstanding is straightened out, Takeo and Rinko become a couple.

At first, the series focuses on the awkwardness of their new relationship, since neither of them have had a relationship before this one. The awkwardness is adorable, though. There are also some obstacles that get in the way of Takeo and Rinko’s budding relationship. In addition to Takeo and Rinko’s relationship, there are also slice-of-life moments such as Takeo becoming an older brother.

While the animation in My Love Story!! is rather average-looking, this actually works well with the tone of the series. Since I watched the anime with the original Japanese audio, I also want to give a shoutout to the Japanese voice actors for Takeo, Makoto, and Rinko. Their voices fit their roles perfectly.

I had read the entirety of the My Love Story!! manga before watching the anime, and I have to say that this series did a great job of capturing the tone and feel of the original manga source material. Since the manga was still ongoing when the anime was in production, the anime doesn’t have a true ending. However, the staff working on the anime found a great place in the manga’s story to end the series. And while this ending may not be a true ending for the story, it still serves as a satisfying conclusion.

My Love Story!! will have the greatest appeal to anime viewers who enjoy shojo series or romance titles. It will likely also appeal to viewers who don’t mind high school protagonists in a story that provides a good mixture of humor and drama.

When it comes to this Blu-ray release, it has 1080p High Definition / 16×9 video. The audio in the set includes English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 and Japanese DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0. I had no complaints about either the video or audio quality of this release.

For the bonus features, My Love Story!! Complete Collection has what I’ve come to expect on Sentai Filmworks’ anime releases. There’s a textless opening, a textless closing, and trailers for other releases Sentai was promoting at the time this set was released. Since this is what I’ve come to expect on Sentai’s home video releases, I wasn’t disappointed by the relative lack of bonus features.

If you’ve seen and enjoyed the My Love Story!! anime and want to add it to your anime home video library, I would recommend this release. To be honest, it appears that this Blu-ray release is the only release for the anime out there for North America at this point, so this Blu-ray set is what you would have to acquire in order to own the anime on physical media.

Additional post about My Love Story!!:

Advertisement