My Mental Choices Are Completely Interfering With My School Romantic Comedy: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		3.0

My Mental Choices Are Completely Interfering With My School Romantic Comedy: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman January 7, 2015

Essay tests are typically the bane of any student’s scholastic life. You typically can’t fake your way through a test where you’re forced to espouse what you’ve learned in your own words. Ask any group of students what kind of test they’d prefer (if they were forced to have to take one, anyway), and chances are the vast majority would opt for a multiple choice outing, where at least various options are laid out and you have a fighting chance of getting at least a few answers right, based on nothing more than mere statistical averages, if not on any actual studying of the subject at hand. My Mental Choices are Completely Interfering with My School Romantic Comedy may have one of the most ungainly titles in recent memory, but it plays on the concept of multiple choice offerings in much the same way those children’s books do where a plot gets to a certain point and then the reader has decide between Option A or Option B, going to the appropriately delineated page, at which point the story picks up in different ways depending on that choice. The hero of My Mental Choices are Completely Interfering with My School Romantic Comedy is a hapless male named Kanade Amakusa, a kid who is laboring under a kind of cosmic curse where he’s forced to choose between two equally absurd options in his everyday life, with those choices then determining where the patently bizarre story goes next. What on its face is a kind of trite casserole of tropes from shōnen, harem and even magical girl enterprises turns out be surprisingly spry when filtered through the obviously contrived premise that the multiple choice events bring, and My Mental Choices are Completely Interfering with My School Romantic Comedy turns out to be a rather slyly humorous anime quite a bit of the time.

The premise of My Mental Choices are Completely Interfering with My School Romantic Comedy is simply posited as a fait accompli, a given so to speak, which doesn’t require much further explanation or analysis. Kanade simply suffers from this apparently Divinely orchestrated “ailment,” one which he has decided to call “Absolute Choice.” At any given moment throughout his day, and frankly usually at the most inopportune moment imaginable, a voice in Kanade’s head informs him of two equally unsavory or at least embarrassing choices, and if Kanade doesn’t choose one of them quickly enough, he experiences soul crushing pain.

The series pays a bit of lip service to high-falutin’ explorations of how various choices throughout history have altered Mankind’s landscape in innumerable ways, a sequence that sees everything from Albert Einstein to samurai traipse by in a frankly rather odd assemblage of historical events and personages. But anyone searching for a pseudo-philosophical or even scientific bent on what’s going on in My Mental Choices are Completely Interfering with My School Romantic Comedy had best look elsewhere, for the series just settles into a comfortably manic mien that is played almost entirely for laughs.

Those laughs are strictly juvenile quite a bit of the time, as in two of the earliest “choices” that Kanade is confronted with. In walking to school one day, he sees a girlie magazine lying on the ground, something that in and of itself would probably tempt most high school males. But Kanade is presented with the choice of either eating the magazine or pressing it to his face and sniffing it repeatedly. He chooses the latter (after a bit of a struggle which seems him frenetically rolling around on the ground and even into a nearby river), at just the moment two younger kids walk by. Later, in school, Kanade is talking to Furano Yukihira, a young girl who’s another outcast of sorts. Suddenly the voice in Kanade’s head tells him he has to either ask to touch Furano’s boobs or ask her to touch his boobs. It’s all resolutely silly stuff, but it does tend to play upon a certain Japanese tradition in anime of detailing teenage angst in absurdly exaggerated ways.

There’s already a quasi-harem feel to My Mental Choices are Completely Interfering with My School Romantic Comedy, courtesy of a couple of girls who are in Kanade’s orbit, but the show really kicks into high gear in that regard with a choice Kanade is forced to make which plays upon a hoary anime trope that fans will no doubt recognize. Kanade is offered an untenable choice at one point, though one of his choices concerns having a girl drop out of the sky onto him. That turns out to be the preferable option, as odd as it may sound, and a patently weird (though quite cute and buxom) young lass named Chocolat appears out of nowhere and quickly begins to wreak havoc in Kanade’s life.

For all the gimmicky setup and harem hijinks, My Mental Choices are Completely Interfering with My School Romantic Comedy turns out to be at its most fundamental another exploration of what it feels like to be an outcast, another hoary anime trope that this series revisits with a bit of a wink and a nudge. Kanade ends up as part of a quintet of “losers,” and even a proffer of absolution from Absolute Choice doesn’t completely dispel the notion that Kanade doesn’t quite know how to fit in. The arrival of Chocolat actually sparks the quest by Kanade to rid himself of his unceasing multiple choices, and while the series tends to go into “mission of the week” storytelling at that point, there’s still rampant physical comedy as well as passing character development.

My Mental Choices Are Completely Interfering With My School Romantic Comedy: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

My Mental Choices are Completely Interfering with My School Romantic Comedy is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Sentai Filmworks with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. This is a nicely bright and colorful looking anime, with good attention to backgrounds, which are often filled with gorgeous purple and orange clouds and sky highlights. Several episodes branch out into alternative forms of animation, as in one where a "recap" of the people in the five losers club goes into near abstract territory. Several key sequences of the anime are intentionally soft looking (see screenshot 1). Line detail is generally very crisp and precise, though there is an odd anomaly when the camera pans up or down, where line detail becomes unstable and jittery. Oddly, this tends not to happen as much in side to side pans.

My Mental Choices Are Completely Interfering With My School Romantic Comedy: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

My Mental Choices are Completely Interfering with My School Romantic Comedy features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 track in the original Japanese only (no English dub is presented, though optional English subtitles are available). The series is very noisy and sonically active quite a bit of the time, and the 2.0 iteration does what it can with many simultaneously and competing elements unfolding. When things quiet down a bit, dialogue is very cleanly and clearly presented, but again can tend to lapse into hysterical, overcooked screaming at the drop of a hat. Fidelity is excellent and dynamic range is very wide on this problem free track.

My Mental Choices Are Completely Interfering With My School Romantic Comedy: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Clean Opening Animations (1080p; 1:32 and 1:32)


• Clean Closing Animations (1080p; 1:32, 1:32, 1:32, and 2:57)

My Mental Choices Are Completely Interfering With My School Romantic Comedy: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

My Mental Choices are Completely Interfering with My School Romantic Comedy is just flat out goofy most of the time. It does traffic in a number of tried (tired?) and true tropes, but it does so with a level of self awareness and even self mockery that tends to make the show undeniably funny, if often on a pretty juvenile level. Technical merits are generally good to excellent, and My Mental Choices are Completely Interfering with My School Romantic Comedy comes Recommended.