TWELVE DAYS OF ANIME 2015 Anime Review: Castle Town Dandelion

Yep, still using this as an excuse to catch up on reviews, I only wish that I was using this time to talk review some of the best shows of the year instead of my least favorite summer shows!

Castle Town Dandelion (Jokamachi no Dandelion)

In another world there is a Japan just like ours with one critical difference, there is still a monarchy (and they have superpowers but that's inmaterial). The king has decided that, instead of automatically declaring his first born or his first son his heir that he will put it up to an election, his nine children have a year of campaigning to win over the citizens hearts for good or ill!

This series had lots of highs and lows, more lows than highs and more middle points than highs as well. When I wanted a more comedic, light show to watch then this show filled that itch pretty well, to me it didn't seem like it was aiming to be anything greater than a fluff piece so I can't really fault it for that. I can find fault however with it's almost creepy fanservice, it felt at odds with the otherwise light-hearted tone and it also felt wrong considering that all of the characters are underaged. Sadly, as the closest thing to a lead character the series has, Akane got the brunt of it which made it feel even weirder, it's a shy character getting oggled by everyone including the audience!

I did really like how the family was presented here, there still was some "brother finds his sister cuter than a real brother would" (I have siblings, I am qualified to speak about this) moments but those were fewer and overall I really liked the family dynamics. I think it captured well how even within a family there are parts that are more dear to you than others, the siblings all love their parents but there's a special connection they have to each other, just by sheer dint of helping raise each other I think. Story did it's best to cover everyone well enough, I think it's fair that it didn't focus on the very young siblings that much and it was pretty well split otherwise (since it's based off of a four-koma there are two or three stories in each episode which lends itself well to a large cast and surprisingly enough didn't make the story feel disjointed).


In the end this was a mostly unremarkable, but not a bad diversion show. Fanservice aside, there's no reason for me not to recommend this show but I fee like this is the kind of show we get every season, a fluff piece that you won't remember long enough to rewatch a few years later, so you might be better off picking up the fluff piece of the current season so you can at least talk about it with friends at the same time.