Arcana Famiglia Final Thoughts--What Action? You Aren't Here For The Bishies?

The hunt for a good reverse harem adaptation continues...

 
Maybe that's a little harsh towards this show, but Arcana Famiglia is only "okay" when it comes to the reverse harem genre. It's not the worst I've seen, but I'm not about to recommend it to people either. It stays within the standard confines of the genre, and while that may endear it to fans, there's nothing here that will change the mind of someone who doesn't like this kind of setup. Of course, there's nothing wrong with that, but Arcana Famiglia tried to paint itself as a different kind of reverse harem in its first episode, only to turn around and indulge the tropes it came with.

A lot of the problems in this show come from the plot, or rather the lack of a cohesive one. The first episode hypes up the Arcana Duello, a tournament that will determine the next head of the mafia family that runs a vaguely Italian island. The other prizes are a promise to have any wish granted and the hand of the current boss's daughter in marriage. The latter is our heroine, Felicita, who immediately challenges her father to a fight over this news, but loses. The overall feeling to the first episode is that Felicita will need to find some new source of strength to beat her father and win her freedom while fighting her friends (and potential suitors) along the way...and that does happen, but only superficially.

 
This is where the promise of the story and the restrictions of adapting a dating sim cause serious problems for the show. The show's first misstep is in trying to present itself as an action show in it's premiere when it really isn't. After the first episode, the Arcana Duello is barely mentioned (aside from characters vaguely stating that they are training) with no further angst from Felicita about the huge life change that is hanging over her if she doesn't succeed. At first I thought that the show was in a time skip to explain the character relationships before getting back to the Duello, but this is a linear narrative. To have a significant gear shift in tone early on was jarring. While the other events the characters were concerned with could get interesting, the entire time I was left wondering what happened to the Duello, and it doesn't come back up again until late in the series.

 
I haven't played the game this adaptation is based on, but it exhibits all the symptoms of trying to cram every character's arc into the runtime, which means a lot is cut or left unexplained. Alongside the confusion of suddenly forgetting about the Duello, each character's "problem" (ranging from parents in comas to human experimentation--I wish I was kidding) is picked up and quickly dropped to move on to whoever the show wants to cover next. None of these plot points get a satisfying resolution, so it feels like the studio was just running through a checklist of scenes to cover instead of worrying about how it would work as a whole. It gets worse when the Duello does come back into play, since the last few episodes cram in a lot of information that could've easily been spaced throughout the earlier plot points.

 
There are also a bunch of details that stuck out and bothered me, from the plot-relevant to just small things that didn't really make sense. Of the former, the Arcana system causes a lot of these problems; how and why the system works isn't even given a cursory explanation (I would've even accepted "because it's magic," but the show doesn't even give it that) and is used by the plot as a dues ex machina for a lot of situations, even in the finale. For the latter, it mostly had to do with details in the setting. I mentioned in my first impressions post about the show seemed unable to make up its mind about what time period it's in, resulting in a mish-mash of different clothing, weapons, and general technology, and that never changes. I think Arcana Famiglia was trying to go for a near-alternate universe so that it could justify it's character designs along with the story, but it ends up being another distracting factor in an already confusing show.

 
With all that said, what makes this show "okay" as opposed to just plain "bad"? The characters end up carrying a lot of the show, and are very likable despite the holes in their plotlines. The exception is Jolly, but he's played as the character you're supposed to hate, so it works out. We see enough of each character to get a good handle on their personality, and the result is a group of friends with solid relationships instead of the stereotypical Fushigi Yuugi knockoff that uses "fate" as an excuse for lack of development. There's also an omake-style skit before the preview on each episode, where the characters force each other to do and say silly things. The little details do sell it to the viewer that this group is a "family." And honestly, characters are what the reverse harem genre is supposed to be about. It's wish fulfillment; pick a favorite (mine is Luca) and go, with the more you know about a character the better.

 
However, Felicita, Liberta, and Nova get the most character focus out of anyone else. I think the show under-utilized Felicita's potential (mostly by treating her like a side character than the main), but she's still leaps and bounds ahead of her peers in this genre just by having a personality. She's not the passive self-insert that's common to the genre, and her choices end up inspiring Liberta and Nova to be better people. This also results in one of the better love triangles that I've seen in anime, with no clear indicator of who Felicita will choose. This all does fall victim to the plot problems that I mentioned above, but Arcana Famiglia does get points for getting me to care about these characters despite whatever randomness the plot had going on.

On a technical level, the animation is pretty consistent and the character designs well-done, even when you look at the fantastic images from the source material (some of which are in the ED). However, there's a surprising drop off in overall animation quality towards the end of the show, which makes me wonder if the final battles weren't cut because of time constraints but because there wasn't enough budget to animate them.


Overall, there are some good parts to Arcana Famiglia, but they get drowned out by adaptation issues. If the plot had focused more on billing itself as the otome show that it is instead of promising a supernatural tournament right off the bat some of those problems might have been resolved. However, that still leaves the numerous plotholes and unresolved issues left in each character's arc as well as a large amount of random gripes that cause the show to fall right on its face. Great characters can do a lot for a show, but this series falls short of that mark. Otome fans familiar with these sort of problems may be able to look past them here, but if the genre has bugged you before, there's not much more to see here.

Images from Crunchyroll.com. Check out the complete screencap gallery on Subdued Fangirling's Google+ page!