Yumeria 6/10

A show about dreams. Not mine. The dreams in this show are about a guy fighting flying buildings with a bunch of girls in skimpy outfits. My dreams are more like the game Shadowman or The Suffering. Dream THOSE dreams every night and you won't wonder why I watch fluff like Yumeria.

From 2004 this show looks pretty good with some really colourful character designs and bright backgrounds. The music is quite good with the opening theme being a standout in the 12 episodes. Being somewhat of a harem anime the choice of voices for the various girls was pretty good and none of the characters' voices bugged me, just what they said. Whoever decided to have one little girl say nothing but "Mone", one little girl put "nanoda" at the end of every sentence, and have the cat yell "Nono" instead of meowing should be drug out into the street and shot. I'm not kidding.

The plot for this show is actually a little deeper then some of the more recent harem shows and hearkens back to such fare as the El Hazard OAV (barely) where there's more of a point to the story than just meeting the girls and screwing around (not literally). Tomokazu has just turned 16 and he's started having strange dreams. He's in a rather barren landscape and meets a little girl who's beside him in bed when he wakes up. This girl only says "Mone" thus that's the name she's given. He meets various other girls, a classmate he's sweet on, a little girl with a cat who puts "nanoda" at the end of every sentence, a slightly younger girl that has just moved back from abroad that he knew as a kid, and a busty older girl that looks suspiciously like his ditzy adopted caretaker but wears a helmet that hides her face.

It turns out Tomokazu has the ability to grant the girls the power to fight the buildings in the dream world but he must touch them which leads to some limited comedy. Things get a little darker near the end of the series and the overall story behind the flying buildings is revealed and various revelations are made. This is hinted at throughout the series and gives you a pretty good reason to keep watching with the hints that are dropped.

The main focus of the show though is the fan service and comedy since this is a harem anime. The fan service is thankfully pretty limited since a couple of the girls are pretty young so most of the best bits in the series are more on the comedy side. There are a lot of instances where the girls misunderstand or jump to conclusions about things Tomokazu says or does that lead them to attack him and accuse him of being a pervert. Some may figure this gets old fast but I never got tired of it.

This series also has the definitely un-haremlike distinction of having the main character actually kinda choose one of the girls by the end of the series. It's not like they get married or anything but Yumeria avoids the harem ending where everything ends up the same at the end of the series as it was at the start and the main guy never comes close to picking one of the girls.

If you don't like harem anime you won't like this but it's different enough and looks good enough to recommend anyway. Try it, you might be surprised.