Amagami SS+

Just finished Amagami SS+.

I give it a 6/10.  This is the second season of Amagami SS, which is based on a PS2 visual novel of the same name.  This is a traditional high school dating game which follows the protagonist, Tachibana Junichi, as he lives his junior year of high school surrounded by beautiful girls.  Two years ago, Junichi was dumped and has developed a fragile little heart.  Being that his childhood friend has been in love with him since they were kids, I had no sympathy for him.

This second season is more or less a "where are they now" thing, since all of the arcs were resolved in the first season.  There's only two episodes dedicated to each girl, and, much like the prior season, I didn't feel two episodes was enough to get anything interesting going.  The story is generic and not very engaging, and any veterans of this genre will probably find it stale.  There's absolutely nothing crazy going on, so don't expect any interesting plot twists.  The girls are already "captured" at this point (thank you, Keima).  This was a major turnoff for me, as your typical "go to the bon festival," "Junichi helps X get into the student council," and "Junichi becomes a borderline camera deviant," really wasn't enough to get my attention.  I will say that I was glad Rihoko got a proper ending, since the poor girl was friend-zoned in her own arc the first time around.

AIC did a good job on the animation.  Like the first season, you won't see anyone with crazy hair or eye colors in this anime, nor will you see any girls with impossibly huge breasts.  The characters are at least believable in that way.

Lonely otaku will stay just for these.

The OP, "Check My Soul," and ED "Kokuhaku," both by Asuza, are pretty good by themselves.  However, in the first season the respective arc's girl sang their ED songs, which they decided to skip on this time around.  I was kind of dissapointed in that.  Our only consolation is a small snippet during the ED relating to the current arc's heroine.  See pic.

The voice acting is decent, but again nothing to write home about. 

The characters are more or less all stereotypes.  You have the childhood friend, school idol, class rep, sister, quiet girl, "one of the guys" girl, and a swimmer who I have trouble putting into any particular stereotype.  Junichi is Shirou-level dense, and I find it hard to believe anyone would fall in love with him unless they're an idiot, which isn't true in most cases for these girls.  I guess being simple-minded is an attractive quality.

I'd recomend Amagami SS+ to anyone whose seen the first season, and Amagami SS to anyone who is relatively new to anime and likes romance anime.  The nice thing about Amagami SS is that there's an arc for each girl, and no one "wins" as you'd usually see in anime like this (because every girl has an ending).  Each girl having their own arc seriously detracts to the amount of content you can have over a 24 episode run, though, and it's even worse with SS+ because it's only 13 episodes.  If you like Amagami SS you'd probably like Clannad.