Toradora!

Me: an occasional anime watcher. Very lazy, so dubs for me.

This is a real gem. It's a story of 5 friends as they come of age, grow together, and the overzealous love of teenagers.

What sells this is that the two primary characters are both quite believable. You have Ryuuji, who is a deeply caring guy, and Taiga, who is aggressive, cocky, and also vulnerable. While the story is told from Ryuuji's perspective, the most interesting character throughout is Taiga as she handles the trials of growing up. Fundamentally, she is not a cookie-cutter "cute girl" to stick in the centre of what is essentially a romantic series; she is needy and often unpleasant, while also caring for her friends deeply.

A lot of anime have craaazy hijinks and characters who are incredibly dense at reading others. The joy of this series is that for the most part, these guys are limited by their own inhibitions in a relatable way and often guess what each other is feeling. It's rare that you want to punch characters for being stupid, at least. Although they may punch each other.

Voice acting in English is pretty solid, certainly above average for anime dubs.

I can usually find lots of things to complain about in everything I watch, but toradora gives me very few. There is more than one person who likes the main character, but you always know who he will actually end up with so that doesn't matter as much. The girl is a tsundere, but they become friends quickly and that doesn't impose on the story too much. I'd like to say that they took too long to get together but really that's just personal preference and I don't think them getting together sooner would have much positive impact on the story, unless we were to have an arc where they were already together.

One thing I do wish was different is that I wish they would have realized their feeling sooner, so that there wouldn't be as much drama or people being sad in the end.

Overall, if you like slice of life anime, or drama anime, or comedy anime, or romance anime, there is a very good chance that you will like this show.

Toradora is an enigma to me as I do not usually like romantic comedies, or even anime in general. And this anime does a lot of things that make me dislike anime: it pulls characters from tropes, however this show made me realize maybe that in itself is not a bad thing, because this show did that but did it so well that that didn't matter to me. The main love interest IS a tsundere but there was so much more to her than that, unlike many shows where the trope defines them, where it IS their character; Tiaga is herself first and tsundere second. This can really be said for all of the characters in this show, many of them seem at first very two dimensional, but in reality as you watch the show you realize they each have their own personality and Toradora shows that, it makes you care for them. You feel these characters struggle and succeed on a personal level until the very end. This show is, for the moment, my favorite anime, and I would say almost perfect if it weren't for the lack-luster ending.

I think this show is incredible and would give it a 10/10 if the ending was better, but it wasn't as bad as a lot of people I talked to said it was. I completely recommend it!

It's your typical "Will They Won't They" for the majority of the episodes, and by "They", I mean everybody. It's not a love triangle, it's a love circle, and that's probably one of the things that make Toradora! so entertaining and fun to watch.

Toradora! does fall in its genre's tropes sometimes, and there are times when things get a little bit too predictable story-wise. But in the end, I felt like there were a lot of things that it did right, and the story was overall satisfying.