Anime comes in many flavors, and can be compared to complex culinary dishes. A Sign of Affection is like a plate of fancy European confections – cute, neat, and almost too sweet! Or maybe it’s more like a box of expensive Valentine’s chocolates. Either way, if you’re senstive to sugar, then proceed with caution as you read this review of the 2024 romance anime, A Sign of Affection.
Article Contents
Story
Score: 7/10
Yuki Itose is a hearing-impaired girl who recently started attending college. She basically can’t hear at all, but communicates through sign language, writing, and simple gestures. A Sign of Affection is Yuki’s story as she falls in love with a male student by the name of Nagi Itsuomi. The starting concept is solid for a drama or shoujo anime. It’s a classic romance setup, but the main character has a significant disability that shapes how she communicates and sees the world.
Though the concept had a lot of room for creative storytelling, the plot was very simple in execution, as well as easily predictable. That made the story slightly boring at times. If you’re looking for innovative and deeply emotional narrative, like with A Silent Voice, you may not be satisfied with the simplicity of A Sign of Affection.
The story themes are also simple, but I think they are important and easy to enjoy, assuming you like the genre. Major themes include the joy of learning new things, the rewards of challenging yourself, the struggles of understanding others, and of course, the wonders of young love. If you don’t like flowery shoujo anime with bright, romantic themes like this, then don’t try A Sign of Affection.
I will also note that the pacing of this anime is fairly good. There are many shoujo romances – such as Kimi ni Todoke – that move far too slowly for me. A Sign of Affection, on the other hand, moves at a reasonable speed. Yuki and Itsuomi meet each other, develop crushes on each other, begin dating, and even have a few kisses and cuddles on screen. All in all, the story category is good enough, but not great.
Visuals
Score: 8/10
As for the visuals in A Sign of Affection, they are generally excellent. The style might not be for everyone, but I enjoy it. The characters have relatively realistic appearances with beautiful faces that emphasize the lips and eyes. The character designs are slightly strange in that everyone has natural hair colors except Itsuomi – with silver hair – and Yuki – with pink hair. Eventually, the story tells us that both of them dyed their hair. It’s still an unusual choice, but I don’t mind.
While there isn’t much in the way of smooth, well-animated action, the visuals are at least rich in detail. Backgrounds, sets, and scenery were all above average. In a few particular installments – like episode 12 – the nature and flower scenery is particularly dazzling. There are many cases of beautiful, emotional face expressions on the characters. Yuki had a lot of adorable and somewhat comical expressions, but also a fair selection of serious and beautiful ones.
Personally, what I love most about the visuals is the color palette. The hues chosen for this anime are so vivid and lovely. There’s a lot of pinks, purples, and blues. Scenes set indoors are generally warmly colored, while outside the silvers and whites make one feel a bit chilly. Scenes set in nature feature brilliant greens and pastel blues. I also love the darker eye and hair color choices for Oushi and Emma. (Oushi has the most handsome pine-green eyes.) Clearly, A Sign of Affection features some gorgeous visuals.
Audio
Score: 8/10
I absolutely loved the audio in this anime. First, let’s talk about the music. The opening song is “Yuki no Ne” (or “Sound of Snow”) by novelbright. It’s an incredibly soft and relaxing song with acoustic guitar and pleasant male vocals. Unfortunately, the ending song wasn’t really my style, but it also wasn’t unbearable. It’s called “Snowspring” by ChoQMay. It has a beat almost like a band marching song, with cute female vocals and pretty piano. You might like it, who knows?
The instrumental music for A Sign of Affection was highly enjoyable and excellent quality. Much of the OST is made of soft emotional music. The main theme – “A Sign of Affection” – starts slow and builds up to a truly moving climax that’s likely to stay in your memory. The composer for this anime was Yukari Hashimoto, who is a sadly underrated musical creator in the anime world. She’s done the music for several excellent anime series, including Toradora, Penguindrum, and March Comes in Like a Lion.
Next, let’s take a brief look at the Japanese voice-acting. Sumire Morohoshi is the talented seiyuu who voiced Yuki Itose. She has a sweet, slightly nasally voice that delivers emotion enthusiastically. I know Morohoshi’s voice from her roles as Emma in The Promised Neverland and Kyouka in Bungo Stray Dogs. In comparison to Morohoshi, the voice actor for Itsuomi didn’t really stand out. His name is Yuu Miyazaki, and he’s only had a relatively few roles in anime. That’s not to say he did badly, though. I enjoyed Miyazaki’s portrayal of Itsuomi.
The rest of the cast performed well, too. I especially love the voice of Nao Touyama, who played Emma. Some find her voice annoying, as it’s high, but strong and distinct. I think her voice is cute and delightfully expressive. Kaede Hondo did excellently playing the lively character of Yuki’s best friend, Rin. The last person I’ll mention is Takeo Ohtsuka, voice of Oushi. Despite having to play a stubborn and unpleasant character, he did a great job making it believable.
Characters
Score: 7/10
For the most part, Yuki is a great protagonist. She goes through a lot of growth in the show, with many moments of genuine struggling as well as finding love and happiness. Like me when I started college, Yuki is under-socialized and extremely lacking in normal life experience. This is due to growing up with a disability and attending a tiny school outside of the standard education system. This helped make Yuki very relatable to me. Furthermore, she’s cute and a good student. What’s not to love?
Despite the solid main character, the character category was not exactly great overall. It was more than satisfactory, but there were issues. For instance, Itsuomi didn’t get as much character development as Yuki. His thoughts and behaviors are thus a bit harder to grasp. Many people found Emma annoying as a character, but I don’t dock too many points for that. I think she’s relatable enough if you try to put yourself in her shoes.
Another issue – at least for me – was the character of Oushi. No matter how much I wanted to like him, I really couldn not. I think the anime should have made him slightly less aggressive. However, at the day, it’s fine to have deeply flawed love interests in fiction. Oushi does start to improve and move on from his obsession with Yuki, even if it takes him a while. It’s fun to watch a childish character become more mature.
The character development was fairly shallow in most cases, but I think it worked well enough for a flowery romance anime. Besides Yuki and Itsuomi, my favorite character was Shin Iryu. I thought he was easy to love and empathize with, despite a simple character concept. He is the passive, quiet male friend who secretly pines after the girl he loves. Shin also happens to be absolutely beautiful in every way, which makes it a pleasure when he’s on screen. That’s about all for my character notes.
Personal Enjoyment
Score: 8/10
As you can see, my personal enjoyment levels were very high for this anime. Despite that, let’s begin by addressing things that took away from my enjoyment. There was nothing directly problematic that I can recall. The main issue was the relatively shallow character development. Also, personally, I would have loved to see a queer character. Unfortunately, there were none in this anime.
While we’re complaining, this anime is just slightly too clean. Since these characters are in college, I would have expected there to be more emphasis on sex, whether shown or simply implied by the narrative. It sometimes feels like shoujo and drama anime series are prudish. It’s not a big deal for me, but it took away from the realism a little bit. Let’s move on to the positives now!
The animation and music were both richly enjoyable. Itsuomi is incredibly sexy and Shin is hot in a completely different way. I enjoy listening to the theme song of this anime and I’d like to explore the OST more as well. In a general sense, I enjoyed this anime because it was so cute and sweet. I’m trying to work on developing and appreciating positive emotions in my daily life. A Sign of Affection is a good series for that.
More specifically, I loved this anime because I relate to Yuki so much. Her relationship with Itsuomi reminds me in many ways of my first real romance, which happened in community college. I also relate to Yuki as someone with a disability – though mine is more psychological in nature. I was very sheltered and lacking in social experience when I started college, just like Yuki. (In my case, it’s because I was homeschooled and poorly socialized.) Yuki’s character and experiences made this anime wonderful for me.
Overall Score
Score: 7.6 / 10.0
To calculate the overall score, I just take the average of the five scores for the categories discussed above. A solidly good anime like this lands right in the 7s range for me. Interestingly, this series got a much higher score on MAL than it did from my personal metric. A Sign of Affection was very well-received, if by a relatively small demographic of viewers. As you can see, it currently sits with a score of 8.22.
You should watch this anime if you like easygoing romance and drama shows with cute and memorable female protagonists. As I explained in the opening paragraph, A Sign of Affection is like a powdered scone or something similarly fancy and delectable. It’s lovely and overwhelmingly sweet. So, if you have an anime sweet tooth, don’t miss this one! Until next time, Sayonara.
~Thanks for reading~
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