Story:
Miyazawa Yukino excels at everything. She's an outstanding student, a strong athlete and is well liked by everyone. There's just one problem. She doesn't show her true personality to anyone outside of her family. She puts on a mask because she loves to be praised. One day her major rival, Arima Soichiro, uncovers the truth behind the mask. The pair become friends and quickly go beyond friendship. The narrative from there goes into their ups and downs as well as their relationships with those around them.
The big narrative problem with this anime is that the last third is really atrocious. Here's the thing. Roughly the first two thirds have a strong comedic aesthetic where problems come up, get resolved in ways that are pretty entertaining and things flow from there. Roughly the last third throws that out and adds a bunch of terribly written angst and poorly thought out drama. This causes the series to devolve from an entertaining romp to being virtually unwatchable. The ending is trash too. Most anime that aren't going to cover an adapted work entirely have the decency to give some closure and end with some pressing issue getting wrapped up. This one takes the rubbish heap route and leaves every single plot point unanswered.
There are some lesser problems before that. Yukino's friend, Maho, talks about dating a dude who's almost thirty and no one finds it creepy except the people in the audience who have sense. Hate to break it to you guys in your late twenties, early thirties, but if you're chasing after high school girls you are objectively a complete fucking creep. Same with those of you in your mid twenties. Even early twenties is pushing it given the developmental difference. The anime is also pretty lazy. It features a lot of long recap segments, a full recap episode and two episodes that are half recap. To an extent, I do understand it since the economy was doing poorly, but it still does impact the quality of the work when it wastes your time rehashing to that extent.
On the positive side, the first seventeen or eighteen episodes are enjoyable, except for the recaps. The high levels of humour work quite well. To the point where you can almost completely forgive the lazier elements. If it had maintained that momentum, this could have been a very solid anime. But some incompetent moron working on the adaptation lost the plot. It was probably Zach. No one likes that guy.
Characters:
The characters were never super complex. Even before Zach ruined everything. But this was a more comedic series and the characters did work well in that regard. Then we reach the shite segment of the series and Arima gets obnoxiously angsty and drags the whole cast down with him. They also introduce a male love interest for the girl who has spent the entire series showing interest exclusively in cute girls. Which actually makes me mad. Like, I haven't entirely forgiven Fire Emblem Fates for pulling that shit with Soleil and I liked that game considerably more than I liked this anime.
It's also a bit annoying that they basically get rid of all Tsubasa's character after wrapping up her arc about her dad remarrying. It's like they couldn't think of anything for her character to do and didn't know how to work her into the friend group. So, they gave up and had her just go feral.
Art:
This is another area where the obvious fiscal problems resulted in a lot of laziness. There are a lot of scenes where characters will be talking and they'll just show some still images of street lights or some other nonsense that doesn't matter and is just boring to look at. They'll also just cut to quiet scenes of the same kind of scenery for no narrative reason and just linger on it to pad out the episodes. The series uses a lot of boring still images and recycled animation in general. It doesn't help that it has one of the worst drawn dogs I've ever seen in anime. How do you have a dog that isn't even a little cute? Honestly, most of it looks pretty bad.
Sound:
Here's where the director royally failed. The acting in this can be pretty damn bad. Shintani Mayumi, Fukui Yukari, Kiyokawa Motomu and several other actors sound really stilted in their delivery. There's also a lot of over the top comedic exaggeration that might be fine in more moderation but gets grating when it's employed this often. I'll give the series credit for having some theme tunes that are pretty good, musically. The imagery isn't. The rest of Sagisu Shirou's soundtrack is pretty mediocre.
Ho-yay:
There's Sakura and her thing for cute girls. There are also moments where both Asaba & Tonami seem to have a thing for Arima. And there's an episode where Yukino's sisters seem to pick up female admirers solely for cheap jokes. Naturally, this episode is at the point where the series has already gotten bad.
Areas of Improvement:
Lose the badly written, ill conceived angst. There's a place for angst. Preferably, as a temporary shift due to some major events. But it doesn't work in a mostly comedic series. Especially when it just keeps going.
Do not give the one character who's been portrayed as not straight a hetero love interest. Yes, we get that bisexual people exist. However, there's also this terrible tendency in media to have one LGBT character to earn some "representation points" and then give that character a hetero normative relationship so you don't actually have to deal with any of that queer stuff. Fuck that. Fuck it with something long, awkwardly shaped and covered in literal spikes.
Have a satisfying conclusion. I get it, Zach is an awful writer and screwed up, thereby making it so the series had to end prematurely. At least give us some closure. End the emo Arima phase and show Yukino's play. Just give us something to make it feel somewhat satisfying.
Final Thoughts:
This is, honestly, a bit difficult for me to rate. On the one hand, I did enjoy the series for about two thirds of it. And if it had maintained that standard, I could somewhat forgive the lazy, rubbish artwork, the lazy rehashing and even the poor directing. If not for the way it ends I'd be going with a "6" maybe slightly higher. However, the final third is utter tripe and those elements that worked get heavily bludgeoned to the point of being nearly unrecognisable and a whole slew of problems come in to make sure they stay damaged. And if the entire series was like those last eight episodes, I'd be giving this a "1" and making rude gestures in its general direction. Still, I can't bring myself to call it bad given the way it started. So, I'm going with a 4/10 for the whole thing. Maybe I'll go read the manga and it won't have the same problems at the end. Maybe that final stretch is what made Tsuda unhappy with the adaptation. In which case, completely justifiable response there.
