Shoujo, romance, drama, a bit of slice o’ life. Oh jeez, it’s a shame I didn’t go after this one the moment it came out, I had hesitations at first, primarily because of the title. A close translation of the title would be “We are here” or “Here we are.” This had me thinking, “Hmm, what kind of title is that?”

One week later, after having watched the first two then-released episodes (fansubbed, of course), I regret hesitating. Read more for synopsis, first impressions, opinions, and of course, spoilers.

The high school life of Nanami Takahashi begins pre-emptively with the expectation of making many new friends. Much to her dismay, things don’t go as planned. Unlike middle school, high school holds many different people from many different middle schools from many different areas from many different backgrounds — you get the idea. She begins knowing more from the girls about Yano Motoharu a popular guy in her class that supposebly “2/3 of his middle school class liked.” Like any new person, she is clueless of who Yano is, until she makes a total klutz of herself in a class nomination by calling her newly-acquainted friend for nomination wrongly. An incident before the nominations resulted in Nana (as we shall now nickname her) forgetting her friend’s name, and after trying to recall her name, she bumps into Yano (of which Nana was completely unaware of his identity at the time) who then gives her a random name to call her friend in correction. This random, and simple name was the trigger for Nana’s embarassing moment during class nominations, and ultimately the start of a relationship between the two.

Of course, when you get juked out of your socks like that from a stranger, you’re bound to get ticked at that person, but over time, Nana begins (somehow) to see a different light of Yano and begins to like him — on the first episode. That’s pure ownage right there. The first episode focuses around this liking, with scenes of frequent chatter between Nana and her fellow classmates and almost no action (in fact, none at all), just like any slice-of-life drama would go on. All talk, most of which are rather important because they pertain to the main characters. Although a good portion of it is chit-chat too, which adds to the liveliness I think. Despite being a so-far rather mellow show, there is definitely a spark in this series that got me. It could be Nana’s timidness, or perhaps Yano’s freaking awesome hair, who knows… maybe I’ll find out soon enough.

First impressions huh? I wasn’t so sure about this at first, but you know what they say — never judge a book by its cover… or in this case, the opening. Believe it or not, this is my first shoujo series, so it took a quick 5 minutes for me to adjust, haha, but it’s all good. T’was. A warning to the manly types out there, I don’t think most males would be attracted by this series — there’s too many cuteness factors and girly-like things for most hardcore guys to take, not to mention lack of violence or matrix-like-bullet-time-movement action stunts or anything to that extremity, but I personally like it. Unlike many other romantic series out there, this one’s got taste, if you can understand what I mean. The characters all have a soft voice, most especially Nana, whose voice is as timid and soft as it can ever be. Yet, it doesn’t hint a lack of emotion, as if the softness is the emotion itself. Don’t know if this means I’m officially gay or not but whatever. One thing that I noticed off the bat is that Nana has a different hairstyle on almost every day. Yes, finally, a character with some personality and realism. I’m going overboard on one episode here, but these are my first impressions. I imagine if they keep up like this, Bokura ga Ita will turn out to be a rather good show.