Anime Special! - Marginal Prince

Marginal Prince anime is similar to Gakuen Heaven & Princess Princess, but it's a more mild version focusing more on friendships and adjustment to life at the academy. The first episode was very nice, simple, well organized & well acted, with good animation and good music, as well as some nicely shown emotion. The story features a half-dozen princely bishounen and an innocent Japanese boy, Yuuta, as the only students in a huge old school on an isolated wooded island in Europe. It is based on a keitai love-sim game for girls. The protagonist's amazement at the school and the princely students is the heart of the first episode, which begins with Yuuta using his keitai to introduce his new schoolmates to his onee-san in Japan, and ends with a mystery and a big problem for Yuuta.

Game

The game was played on Japanese cell phone network NTT DoCoMo. The goal of the game was to form romantic relationships and hear love songs. Speech recognition software was employed to allow the player to directly converse with the characters. The player made story choices, spoke with characters, and heard characters conversing with each other. Different images were displayed on the player's phone depending on conversation choices and clothing selections. The game offered multiple endings depending on player decisions throughout the game.

Anime

Genres: romance, slice of life
Themes: bishounen, male harem, school

The main character, Yuuta, is supposed to be the viewer's younger brother who goes off to study abroad on a small island in the Atlantic that can not be found on any map. The school he enters is called St. Alphonse Gakuin (St. Alphonse Academy). The boys who study here are all "marginal princes" which appears to mean Princes of remote, frontier or border regions.

Director: Takayuki Inagaki
Studio: Tokyo Kids
Network: AT-X, Chiba TV, Sun TV, Tokyo MX TV, TV Kanagawa, TV Saitama
Original run: October 1, 2006 – December 24, 2006
Episodes: 13