I did eventually get sucked in and want to see more, but it was a slow start. To its credit, the series does eventually address nearly all of my early critiques, but our main protagonist is not one of them. Hibiki is just so bland. She's one of those characters who comes across as being just a little too perfect. The thing that was supposed to make her stand out was her ability to see and communicate with ghosts, but the ghosts in this show are super... accessible. When regular people can see them through the lens of their cell phone cameras, it sort of takes away from the one thing that was supposed to make Hibiki stand out.
And then there's her group of friends... I will say that they grew on me over time. But they certainly contributed to episode one being really hard to swallow. This show starts out with that 'Main character with a dead mother moves to a new town trope.' But very little time is focused on showing Hibiki settle in. One second it's her first day, then jump to a week later and she already has a close group of friends who believe in her abilities completely and have no reservations about hanging out with the girl who speaks to the dead. Right... To be fair, none of these new friends are exactly what one might call "normal" themselves, and as time went on, their own quirkiness grew to be more endearing than unrealistic.
Re-kan! is certainly a lot more lighthearted than all the other ghost shows I've been watching lately. But it does have its moments where they do address death and the effect is has on the living. Namely, grief. And it was those slightly darker, more heartfelt episodes that really drew me in. As I mentioned, this is still a Slice of Life series, and it shows. They have their beach day and their culture festival and their New Years' celebration, but these episodes all have a supernatural twist to them that held my interest a lot more than those sorts of episodes usually do.
If you're already a Slice of Life fan, I definitely suggest checking this one out. And if you're not a SoL fan, but you enjoy things with a supernatural touch, (like myself) you may want to give this one a try also. My suggestion is to watch at least up through episode three before deciding whether to continue or not. (That was the first of the deeper episodes, the ones that gave me hope for this series.) Personally, I'm going to call this a mission accomplished and put the genre to rest for a while.
