The story follows a normal high school boy named Shoutarou who has a not-so-normal friend called Sakurako. She has an unhealthy addiction to bones of all things, and finds it fascinating to study their history. By some strange coincidence, whenever the two of them are together they just so happen to get themselves accidentally involved in numerous bizarre cases, usually where a corpse or a skeleton is found and they have to figure out its story. So it's a mystery anime, which is definitely something I appreciate since we don't get to see too many of them nowadays, and it's also one of the more interesting genres in fiction in my opinion.
Unfortunately however, Sakurako-san is not what I would call a "satisfying" mystery anime. The reasons being a) it's episodic, and b) it's rushed. All of the cases in this anime are resolved in either 1 or 2 episodes, resulting in a myriad of short stories instead of a longer ongoing problem. And quite frankly this is a very bad thing for a series of this genre. Think about it; a complete mystery story needs:
1. A foundation to establish the setting of the case
2. A problem to be solved needs to pop up (like a murder for example)
3. The detective must look around for clues
4. After all the clues have been gathered, the detective must be given time to think about them and try to put the puzzle together (which of course lets the viewers do so as well at the same time)
5. The case must now be solved, the truth brought to light and, if possible, the culprit arrested
6. Finally everything must be wrapped up and the aftermath of the entire incident presented
So all-in-all, that's quite a lot of ground to cover. In fact, that's way too much ground to cover in just 1-2 anime episodes. There's simply not enough time to go through all the steps properly without either rushing it completely or making the mystery so simplistic that it's not even interesting to begin with. And this is the main problem with Sakurako-san as an anime, namely that it time and time again tries to do too much in too little time.
Instead it almost feels like the anime is trying to cheat the system by skipping a step or two. The whole investigation and pondering phases are almost cut off completely. How? Well simply by making Sakurako be absurdly overpowered as a detective. By that I mean to say that it doesn't matter whether the case in question ends up revolving around human biology, psychology, chemistry or 19th century painting techniques; no matter what it is, Sakurako knows everything. She can figure out any mystery within minutes with almost no clues to work with. In other words:
a) Every case ends up feeling very unimportant due to how quickly and easily they are solved
b) It gives the viewer almost no time to think for themselves (which is without a doubt the #1 most important thing in a detective story so this is a huge problem)
c) There is very little semblance of tension since you always know that Sakurako is going to save the day within the next minute no matter what
d) It significantly lowers the story's sense of realism as it doesn't really feel believable a lot of the time
e) As soon as a mystery is resolved, we're back to the status quo again. In other words it kind of feels like the story doesn't even matter in the long run. Although there are brief tie-ins to previous story arcs on rare occasions, it's not anything particularly noteworthy
So I've talked a lot about Sakurako, but what about Shoutarou, our supposed protagonist? Well... there really isn't a whole lot to say about him. He's just "there" as a sidekick, and Sakurako is the one always dragging him along and calling the shots. It's almost like his sole purpose in the show is to be someone for Sakurako to show off to. There are also a bunch of other characters in the show, but they're about as forgettable as it gets. Really the entire anime revolves around Sakurako herself and no one else, which would be common for a detective series, but given that she's hardly what I'd call a well-written detective for a mystery story I still can't consider it a good thing.
In the end though, despite the fact that there are tons of issues with Sakurako-san as an anime, they all stem from the exact same source. The heart of the problem is quite simply that the total episode count is *way* too small. They should have taken the same amount of content and adapted it in maybe 24 episodes instead of compressing it into merely 12. Everything comes down to that. The rushed pacing means that every mystery story gets way too little exposition and instead they have to fill the holes by using Sakurako as a cheat code, enabling them to skip out on half the steps in every arc. That's like a band aid measure, it doesn't actually resolve the problem itself whatsoever. What makes the mystery genre so fascinating is the process of solving the matter at hand; you investigate for clues, try your best to put them together, and then finally present the solution. Sakurako-san however basically skips out on all that and just blatantly gives you the answer right away. Talk about taking just about all the fun out of it.
With all that being said, Sakurako-san is still a decent anime which might be worth checking out. It just annoys me because I sincerely believe that it could have been really damn good had it just been paced better (or not been episodic to begin with), but instead we're left with an incredibly flawed final product. Good mystery anime are quite rare to come by, so it saddens me when a series like this pops up with all the potential in the world, only to fall flat for a quite needless reason.
