Honey Lemon Soda is Frustrating…

Article at a glance:

• Honey Lemon Soda tackles serious themes, but I found its approach frustrating, especially with Miura’s inconsistent, brash behavior and his dynamic with Ishimori.
• The production quality is undeniably impressive, with beautiful art, smooth animation, and great opening and ending themes.
• Despite its potential, I couldn’t connect with the story and struggled to get through three episodes.

Let me preface this article by saying that all reviews involve a certain amount of subjectivity. I try to be objective with my reviews, but sometimes that just isn’t possible. Honey Lemon Soda is one of those special instances. So whatever I say about this anime will be even more subjective than my usual reviews. It is not possible to be purely objective about an anime like this.

So please understand this: whatever I say about this anime, these are my thoughts. Yours may differ and that is completely fine. I know that I may not be the target audience.

With that long introduction out of the way, welcome back to another first impressions article. And today we are talking about Honey Lemon Soda. I decided to check this out because I am a fan of romance animes and well, safe to say I am not a huge fan of it. So let’s get started.

What did I think of Honey Lemon Soda?

Let’s start with the issues. Look, I have no issues with serious or depressing shows. Evangelion is one of the most depressing shows to exist and I will always scream at the top of my lungs about how much I love Evangelion. But the thing is, watching HLS makes me feel miserable. I appreciate that it is a story about a bully victim trying to get back on her feet and a setup like that has a lot of potential. But there should be a certain tact while tackling matters like this and I feel like this anime lacks that.

To extend my previous point further, the male MC, Miura has a very inconsistent character. Yes, he is caring in his own way but he is so overly brash at times that it just turns my brain off. If anything, him being needlessly brash makes me even worse for poor Ishimori. Ishimori falling for Miura makes no sense to me. I get it, we tend to cling to people who helped us out when we were at a low point but come on, is it all that takes to fall in love with someone? Seriously, to me, their dynamic is more frustrating than anything.

Maybe things get better down the line but here’s the thing, if I can’t sit through 3 full episodes of the show, how do you expect me to reach episode whatever to get to the “good part”? There are some aspects where this anime deserves praise though. The art and animations look amazing. I love the color tone they went with in the art style. The opening and ending themes both are really good as well. They are well presented and the songs are decent as well. So no complaints about the production whatsoever.

See? This is why I say that big shounen manga that sells multi-million copies like Fairy Tail and Sakamoto Days deserve better adaptations. How does this random romance show have a better production than Fairy Tails?! WTF?

That is all for now

That is all for now. Let me know what you guys think in the comments. As I said, this article is way more subjective than what I usually write and I know that Honey Lemon Soda in general will cause a lot of differences in opinion. With that said though, I will take my leave here. I am off to play some Kingdom Come Deliverance. See ya!

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