Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai
Length: 12 Episodes + 6 Short Episodes
Genre, as perceived by Dogy: Comedy, Slice of Life, Romance
Dogy's overall score: 77/100
Would I recommend it? Not exactly, but it's not bad.
Who would I recommend it to? Anybody who wanted a short series to burn time.
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Chuunibyou was an interesting roller coaster that, in my opinion, kinda fell flat at the end. The series was built around an interesting topic, the antics of "8th Grade Syndrome", and it had a lot of room to build off of that idea. With the tales of the Dark Flame Master, the Wicked Eye, and friends, there were plenty of ideas that could have and were thrown around. But, for whatever reason, it seems like the creators sorta gave up halfway through the series.
See, the beginning of it was fairly upbeat, light-hearted comedy. The jokes were completely based off of character actions, their imaginations, and a few physical, visible seeds. Sure, it wasn't exactly the most hilarious thing that happened this year, but it's kinda comical to see two girls doing what they believe is an epic anime-esque battle, but all that's really happening is they're flailing around like retarded freshmen.
The creators backed this idea to the point of making a short episode to (I think) precede the upcoming episode. And it's not like the random SAO shorts with chibi drawings and wasting time with stuff from 20 something episodes ago, they were full productions that seemed like they really could have just been another left off segment. They were worth the time.
Eventually, though, this went away. And so did a lot of the core things that built the anime up to me.
Somewhere in the middle (7 or 8, or so), they throw a fairly huge curve and kick the romance portion off. And please don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against romance in my anime. But the way it was done detracted from everything, in my opinion. They first thing that stands out about this is how the comedy almost disappears because of this. A lot of the core group winds up turning fairly stagnant as their role gets fixed into some part of the relationship wheel that's going on. And with that, the one character who was actually the center of any romance in the beginning is all but benched through this.
Again, this wouldn't be any kind of problem if everything wasn't through out of wack on account of somewhat left field addition. You have characters practically being forgotten, plot points going every which direction, and all the while everybody just seems to kinda bum around in the process. While there is a main theme of this "internal struggle and confusion" with some of the main characters, it didn't help that it felt spread through the entire series. Everything kinda turned into a funneled blob, to me.
The end didn't help too much for this series. Granted, if there somehow is a second season (which doesn't make sense to me where they ended it, but I could see it happening) then the ending is actually needed to give the series ANY kind of unique identity. But for the 12 episodes that make up the current anime of Chuunibyou, it felt very streamlined like the tail end of the series. Stuff just... kinda happened for no real (super obvious) reason. I hate to sound like a broken record, but if it weren't for the few episodes leading up to it, they probably could have pieced it together in a more interesting fashion.
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All in all, the series was good. It's included in the first season of "trying a bunch of anime that sounds half way interesting to see if I like more than I know", and I'm not going to say I was disappointed. In fact, I was fairly pleased with everything overall. The beginning of it had me hooked. The characters are (probably going to be) fairly memorable, I was looking forward to the next episode, everything was great. And then, it just fizzled out. Not to the point of the show being bad, no no far from it. But it just fell down into the general level to me.
I'm ok with the fact that I gave it 30 minutes of out of my week for the past 12 weeks. ^_^
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