All reviews here are positive, I wanted to leave a review for people who might not like this anime. It has raving reviews on the web, someone said here (correctly) that the first half of the episodes is a drag, but I forced myself to carry on due to the reviews. In the end, it gets much better, but I wouldn't recommend it to any adults (or 18+), which makes sense since it's probably aimed at a 8-14 yr old audience.
Why would an adult want to watch this? Well, because there are animes with deep and heart-warming messages, even though they're aimed at children. Hayao Miyazaki's films comes to mind; in terms of series, one can think of Natsume's Book of Friends / Mushishi, Barakomon / Usagi Drop, Angel Beats / Plastic Memories, Clannad After Story etc. Any of these series has much more depth to their story, characters and messages than Toradora.
I don't know if people were using a different translation, but I couldn't see any depth in most Toradora's episodes (the last ones are a bit different, but they go through an entirely predictable and beaten path in animes, copied and pasted basically). Toradora's character are shallow, almost unidimensional (the exception is the obvious transformations towards the end into something a bit more mature), unrealistic and very childish. Unrealistic characters are fine, Clannad and Angel Beats, for example, have a bunch of them, but their unrealism serves a higher purpose. Here they are unrealistic mostly due to their silliness, I guess it's supposed to be funny, but in a brattish way for children to laugh. When they blossom in the end, it's still unrealistic, unfunny, childish and silly, there aren't bigger life lessons to be transmitted.
Why am I writing this review? Because I can't believe that adults would recommend this. From the visual style, you can already see it's not aimed at adults, so it's of course fine for teenagers to like and recommend it, but I feel cheated and having wasted my time watching this series (which could easily be shortened to 15 or 12 episodes at any rate), please correct me if I'm wrong, but I read adults recommending this and I must have understood them wrong, they must be recommending it for pre-teens. So viewer beware
Why would an adult want to watch this? Well, because there are animes with deep and heart-warming messages, even though they're aimed at children. Hayao Miyazaki's films comes to mind; in terms of series, one can think of Natsume's Book of Friends / Mushishi, Barakomon / Usagi Drop, Angel Beats / Plastic Memories, Clannad After Story etc. Any of these series has much more depth to their story, characters and messages than Toradora.
I don't know if people were using a different translation, but I couldn't see any depth in most Toradora's episodes (the last ones are a bit different, but they go through an entirely predictable and beaten path in animes, copied and pasted basically). Toradora's character are shallow, almost unidimensional (the exception is the obvious transformations towards the end into something a bit more mature), unrealistic and very childish. Unrealistic characters are fine, Clannad and Angel Beats, for example, have a bunch of them, but their unrealism serves a higher purpose. Here they are unrealistic mostly due to their silliness, I guess it's supposed to be funny, but in a brattish way for children to laugh. When they blossom in the end, it's still unrealistic, unfunny, childish and silly, there aren't bigger life lessons to be transmitted.
Why am I writing this review? Because I can't believe that adults would recommend this. From the visual style, you can already see it's not aimed at adults, so it's of course fine for teenagers to like and recommend it, but I feel cheated and having wasted my time watching this series (which could easily be shortened to 15 or 12 episodes at any rate), please correct me if I'm wrong, but I read adults recommending this and I must have understood them wrong, they must be recommending it for pre-teens. So viewer beware