Much better than I'd expected. The first episode did two things I disliked, but they're both trivial and of no significance for the show as a whole. The rest of the episodes I thoroughly enjoyed.

It's a shortish-form romantic comedy with lots and lots of characters. Each episode is split into segments, each only a few minutes long and devoted to a different couple. These will be high school students who are dating, hoping in a deeply pathetic way to date, trying to interfere with someone else's dating and/or generally making a frightful mess of the whole "date" thing. Our usually incompetent heroes include:

1. JUN, YUKI AND HOTARU - Jun's a very serious, mild-mannered boy with no sense of humour. Yuki fancies him rotten, but she's also a gleeful tease who loves winding him up. Hotaru is Jun's little sister and she likes him way too much, which is actually one of the funniest things in the show because it sends her to war with the far smarter and more mischievous Yuki. My only complaint is that this trio don't appear in enough episodes.

2. KAMINE AND GOUDA - Kamine's a lovely girl who's hopelessly in love with a dense brick called Gouda. She's so happy to be near him. He's happy as well, probably, but he's so stoic and bad at guessing that being his girlfriend is a lot like having a relationship with a tree. They're charming anyway, though, partly because Gouda's very serious and well-meaning about everything. It just takes him a while to catch up. Kamine also pulls the most adorable faces.

3. SUGAWARA AND TAKANO - not unlike Kamine and Gouda, but gender-flipped and much less likely to get together. Sugawara likes Takano, who's unfortunately stoic and self-deprecating to a ridiculous degree. She barely seems to see herself as human. Try to confess your love to her and she'll assume you couldn't possibly mean it and so you were just being nice.

4. MASAFUMI AND RYOKO - a bit of a dodgy one. Masafumi is a bit of a bastard who kicks off the relationship with something a bit like blackmail. (He's the student council president and he caught her smoking on school grounds.) As for Ryoko, she's a delinquent. Masafumi wants to reform her. This ends up leaving behind both "romantic" and "comedy", instead being about Ryoko's insecurities about what people will think about someone like her trying to get serious about studying. It's a relatively short scene, as are they all in this series, but still quite a good one.

5. KANA AND CHIAKI - they're childhood friends who goof together all the time and think on the same wavelength... but only when it comes to goofery. She thinks they've been dating for a year. He thought she was joking. They belong together, but they also have possibly terminal problems with being able to turn off that light-hearted front and be serious with each other.

6. THE DATING MASTER - okay, there's a girl who likes him. Her name's Matsuura. However our blonde hero is greater than such things (and probably oblivious to them). He's the kind of self-worshipping ham who calls himself a Love God, makes the air sparkle when he talks and is basically a ridiculous shoujo cliche transported into a realistic setting. He's hysterical. He's full of himself. Every word he says makes you want to strangle him. However he also gives people surprisingly perceptive advice and he's actually a force for good in the show. It's just that he's also deranged.

The last few episodes take the ongoing story more seriously. They're still funny, but our potential couples are in danger of walking away from each other permanently. Either (a) they've always been catastrophically bad at conveying how they felt, or (b) they've managed to fall out and then repeatedly miss each other in communications failures that could have been played for either tragedy or farce. (It's mostly the latter and you'll be laughing your head off, but it's still threatening to set up the former.)

Oh, and the art's ugly. It looks cheap, especially in the title sequence. However that simplicity can sometimes create wonderful things with its looseness. I'm thinking of Kamine's facial expressions.

In some ways, this is a very simple show. It doesn't have an overall storyline. Rather, each couple has their own little unfolding story, mostly being played for comedy. At its best, it's killingly funny. Mum in ep.4, for instance. Sometimes it can feel like the highlights of a much longer series. Not all the couples' stories are equally successful, but that's okay. I greatly enjoyed this show.