Crunchyroll recently added Marginal Prince to their streaming service. It's an adaptation of a love simulation game of the same name from the early 2000s. Boy, does it feel like it! It's always interesting to go back and revisit anime from two decades ago, especially when you grew up during that era. A wave of nostalgia washes over you, and you start to notice certain things about a show's production that inherently feel very familiar. Still, it's not a good kind of familiarity. While watching Marginal Prince, I just kept noticing many things that reminded me of why I wasn't a fan of these types of shows back then.

The presentation is arguably worse than bare bones. The character designs feel very flat and uninspired, with the hairstyle or hair color as the main distinguishing factor. The actual animation quality ranges from "OK at best" to "so bad it's good" territory with poorly drawn movement and awful perspective shots when there actually is animation. You'll spend about half your viewing experience watching still frames. The soundtrack feels dated in both its style and execution. Most of it consists of what sounds like generic visual novel music, from uppity happy tracks to overly dramatic stings. It also doesn't help that the soundtrack is used in a very distracting way. The soundtrack doesn't seamlessly work its way into scenes as a compliment; rather, Marginal Prince has this bad habit of starting a track, cutting it short when a new scene starts, using no music for a few minutes, and then immediately starting a new track the minute that something interesting happens. You get used to it as the series continues, but I was legitimately getting jump-scared by the soundtrack after the first couple of episodes.

Marginal Prince doesn't have the strongest start, with an incredibly contrived and forced dramatic beat that generates tension between our protagonist, Yuta, and the rest of the cast. It's a plot line involving a stolen item that Yuta gets blamed for just by being present. While it was probably done to humanize the cast immediately, it created the opposite effect. I did not want to bond with any of them due to how overly dramatic everything was being played up. So, considering all these things, you think I would hate the show by the end, but surprisingly, I don't.

Is it incredibly dated by today's standards? Yes, some jokes have not aged well, like the creepy doctor and his patient gag. But after we got over that rough start, something clicked in my brain as I continued to watch Marginal Prince. After establishing the main cast, the series goes for a loosely episodic approach with an overarching story in the background. Through this narrative setup, I feel the show finally found its footing. While the overarching plot felt like total nonsense in a fun way, the episodic episodes were genuinely interesting. They were cheesy and still overly dramatized situations, but things felt more endearing once it started giving each character more focus.

The primary setting of Alphonso Gakuen is established as an academy specifically for the elite, which means everyone here comes from some privileged background, and with that privilege comes a lot of pressure. Focusing on the individual struggles that every character goes through, whether it's baggage at school or home, made me care about these lovable dorks because that's what they are. Whether it's Alfred struggling to find his identity as an actor alongside his daddy issues or Sylvain hiding his trauma behind a mask of an obnoxious foreign otaku stereotype, there was just enough here for me to leave each episode with a smile on my face, hoping that these guys would be able to find a moment of happiness in their lives. It's far from groundbreaking, and every episode is filled with so much cheese that you risk getting indigestion, but I think if you take your time digesting it like I did, there's a lot of fun here.

Every episode has its own music number, with each character just having a moment to casually start singing out loud on campus during a montage. Not only are these the best parts of the show, but these montages can range from walking across the school to straight-up dancing in the forest. At first, I thought the show was just being overly dramatic again, but the other characters acknowledge the singing that is going on, so it's something that many characters do when they're hitting an emotional breakthrough. I could practically feel the staff winking at me from the other side of the animation cels because they must know, right?

While there is drama here about societal pressures, classism, and finding your place in the world, there's also a mode of self-awareness here. Every episode starts with a video call over the phone to reference the anime's mobile game origins. Maybe that's what clicked with me and what I think has the potential to click with a lot of other people; this is a show that doesn't take itself too seriously while also acting as an interesting glimpse into the type of adaptations that were a lot more common during the early 2000s.

Still, recommending a show like this will always be challenging because, with dozens of shows coming out each season, recommending a cheesy and sappy story about a bunch of boys being extremely friendly to each other while dealing with aristocratic-based trauma will be a hard sell. In that case, why wouldn't I recommend something like Ouran High School Host Club instead? Yes, this show probably isn't going to be worth a lot of people's time. However, I think it's been a while since I've watched a show that was this cheesy and dramatic in this specific way. If you're scrolling through Crunchyroll's backlog and want some cheese to go with your evening wine when you want to kick back and laugh at something, then I don't think you could do too wrong with taking a peek at this.