Nora to Oujo to Noraneko Heart (ノラと皇女と野良猫ハート) Review

Visual novel anime adaptations have been in a rough spot lately — so rough that barely any new ones get made. We had Aokana a while back, then only Wagamama High Spec, and that one turned out to be a short-form affair. The long-rumored Island adaptation is still MIA. But eventually we did get a new one:

Nora to Oujo to Noraneko Heart (ノラと皇女と野良猫ハート)

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I had high hopes for this adaptation, because the game really is good. On the script and music side it’s basically top-tier. The soundtrack is put together with real care — you can see it in the OST, tons of tracks with actual intent behind them, and the princess’s theme gets rearranged and reused in several places to keep the melody tied to the character. As for the story, you can sum it up in one phrase: it knows when to breathe.

By that I mean the game isn’t just heartwarming — it’s funny, and it’s got some life philosophy in there too. These things sound like they’d clash, but the script blends them cleanly. It’s funny when it wants to be funny, then leaves you a little sad after the laugh, and sneaks the life lessons in through that sadness. So when the anime was announced, I optimistically figured it might even hit Gintama levels.

Reality slapped me in the face fast. The promo dropped and I was just sitting there like an idiot.

Short-form / chibi characters / DMM production

Those three tags made the sad truth about this anime very clear:

No money

Animation burns cash. Plenty of visual novel adaptations get made even with a backer and still turn out like crap — 11eyes, for example. Some have scripts that are fine but can’t reproduce the art style, and most VNs have stories too dense to adapt without hacking them to pieces. It’s thankless work all around.

Having money doesn’t guarantee a good anime. So you’re telling me you don’t have money?

Isn’t that just doomed?

But I said earlier that this game’s scriptwriter, Hato, is seriously skilled — he knows how to make a script breathe. And he’s the series composition and scriptwriter for the anime too…

If it’s him, he should be able to make the anime breathe too, right?

So episode 1 looked okay. Episode 2 was passable as a gag 4-koma. Episode 3… episode 4… episode 5…

Watching them one by one, it was actually decent as a little gag 4-koma. Then episode 6 happened.

What the hell is this?

And what the hell is this?

Honestly, episode 6 isn’t even animation. It’s just sheep footage with some voice acting slapped on.

Did the budget actually run out? Can they not even finish the animation?

Then in the later episodes it turned out they could still animate, they just kept busting out new gimmicks — fanservice, straight-up reusing the VN interface, then swinging back to the main plot for the tearjerker stuff. Before I knew it I’d watched the whole thing, and then it hit me: this was all Hato’s scheme.

Think about it — there’s really only one reason to make a visual novel anime: to advertise the game. Almost nobody actually expects to profit off the anime itself.

For a project as broke as Nora to Oujo to Noraneko Heart, if you can effectively advertise the game, get the tagline out, and make people who watched the shorts interested in the game, that’s a success.

And that’s where you see how deep Hato’s playbook goes. You can see it in the game’s OP — there’s a random “Pacific” bit thrown in that triggers the pedantry of Japanese otaku. That “Pacific” means nothing. It’s only there to give people something to talk about. And when it comes to manufacturing buzz, Hato is a veteran. The biggest stunt was episode 6, the “all-sheep episode” — all sheep, nothing else. People were confused at first, but “once you accept the premise it’s kind of fun,” and the show’s popularity blew up fast. It’s a short-form show so it’s easy to pick up, the OP isn’t bad, and there are jokes about the anime’s own plot, like that “treasure from mom” bit. So you see Hato contributing even more to drumming up buzz for the anime itself. Not just that — later there’s that weird detective episode that mimics the VN interface. It all shows some genuinely clever planning on the production side.

By the finale it swings back to the actual story, so the people who stuck around for the shorts get a sense of where the game goes, and the anime finishes its job nicely.

What job? Using a budget-starved anime to advertise the game.

Those weird, seemingly nonsensical anime gags made the show blow up on Niconico, and more and more people started paying attention to the original. Nora to Oujo to Noraneko Heart 2 is about to launch, and the sales look like they’ll be great.

Times like this I remember Hato really is talented. If you want to praise someone as capable, the highest compliment is: “gets the most done with the least money.”

So Hato is the living embodiment of “spend less, get more done.”

Absolutely insane.