Girlfriend (Kari)

Girlfriend(Kari) is your typical slice of life show that aired in Fall 2014 which puts you into a soft and a fluffy atmosphere. It obviously has high budget, judging from its content, however, it is left unnoticed by most viewers because of its genre, slice of life and school. This anime mainly focuses about daily lives of high school girls added with some blend of moe and light fanservice.

Some consider this anime as trash, moeshit, or even pure garbage. But the anime itself isn't that bad, it has a very satisfying ending.

Story - 4 - Decent

GF has no particular story at all, it is ... like episodic and repetitive, featuring cute girls in their daily high school lives every episode and a bit of friendship thingy.This anime only takes things lightly,so stay away from this if you want some serious drama slice of life or something.
For every episode they have those little problems of their lives and help each other, then for the last minutes of the episode they wrap things up making a conclusion.
My only problem is that, why don't they just set the story in an all-girls school instead of an open school for both men and women?

Art - 9 - Great

From Silver Link studio, they present us cute character designs and having a light fanservice. It is of high quality and top-notch, the backgrounds were nice and pleasing to the eyes, fitting the mood of the anime.
Every girl is detailed and we can distinguish them from each other from their character designs.

Sound - 9 - Great

With over 30+ characters in this anime, I must say they did a great job to portray each characters' voices. I can't just ignore the voice acting of the characters. Superb.
The Opening, Tanoshiki Tokimeki, by Neuron Creamsoft(which I believe is performed by the cast), is good and kinda grows in you. It fits well with the anime.
The Ending, Hareru Kana by Kokomi Shiina, the main lead of this series, is very calm and pleasing to the ears. It's just so cute, that cutesy ED is rare to find these days. It blends perfectly with the anime's heartwarming atmosphere.
The BGM were also nice, adding to the mood and atmosphere of the show, but didn't stand out nor bad.

Character - 8 - Very Good

As I have mentioned, there are 30+ characters in this anime, however, there are five main characters that gets most of the screen time of course. There are varieties of girls in this anime, some may be generic, some may be unique, and some are pretty entertaining.

Enjoyment - 6 - Fair

I have to admit it, but this anime is really boring at times and does not live well to your expectations. I guess comedy is one of the things that it lacks. But I think it is normal for a slice of life show to be like that. Sometimes I consider this to be a pain to watch because it is so boring.

4+9+9+8+6=32/7=7.2

Overall - 7 - Good

I don't know why but this anime has its touch that it makes it something quite special. For those who wants to watch this, sure, it is worth watching, but be reminded that this is quite boring and you might drop it. I think it was a good way to promote the video game, and it didn't do anything bad.

This is also a good anime if you something that is heartwarming, cute girls doing cute things, or if you want to pass time and add another entry to your list. As I have said above, I think it has a very satisfying ending and still worth watching.

"Girlfriend (Kari)" (GF) is a slice of life anime, it's a healing type anime. This means the goal of the anime is to make you feel good. Every episode will contain a little story which ends well. There is some mild humour/drama to keep things a bit interesting, but don't expect amazing or long stories. This is basically all it contains. So if you're looking for action, a comedy, a drama or anything romance/love related you don't have to watch it. Also practically the whole cast consists out of girls. Slice of life, friendship, cute girls doing cute things and short stories are the key ... terms for this anime.

Story
There's no general story in the anime. Instead every episode is a short story about some event. Usually it's about something an event/situation inside the school. Since it's about events it doesn't exactly follow a specific character around. This makes it more approachable for people who don't like one character. It's possible that if you don't enjoy one episode because you don't like a specific character, you might like the next one. The series start in the fall, you get to see a couple of events till the end of the year.
A couple of examples of events/situations are, a girl trying to figure out how to get control her weight. In case you wondered why this would be interesting, it's not really. However through her actions and interactions she'll bond with people and work together with them, which is heart warming in the end. A second example is a story how 2 seemingly polar opposite girls became friends. Although they had nothing in common, they met and through the circumstances they become best friends. Ofcourse there were some set backs which makes the little story a bit more interesting than "I came, I conquered".

Characters
Almost the entire (active) cast of GF is made up out of high school girls from the same school. According to MAL there are 5 main characters. I would say that the five mentioned on MAL have more screen time than the remaining characters. But since there's no actual character followed as main character, all the girls sort of all feel equally important every time a new episode starts. The about 35 "non-main character girls" or so have less screen time and tend to move around in groups a bit more. This results in them having seemingly shallower characters. Some of them (or groups) will get a spotlight in certain episodes while others are only following a supporting role.
This results diverse episodes, which make episodes still enjoyable even if you happen to not really like certain characters. Even if you don't really like one of the five main character girls, you don't follow them every single episode. Also every girl has a different voice actress, this is pretty nice since there are lots of different girls. I personally think it makes the girls more diverse.

Art, the art is OK. It's not amazing, but typically what you expect to see in a cute girls doing cute things type of anime. With lower than average details. Basically, what you see is what you get. There's not a lot on the screen so basically if there's no reason for a prop to be on the screen, it's basically not there. There are no eye candy unused water bottles on tables for example. Counters are neat and don't have anything on them. So you shouldn't really expect exceptional art. I would say it's not above average of what you would expect in 2014. The animation is sort of not that great too. A lot is rather static. When something does move it might not move very fluently or natural. If you're not easily bothered by this, I think it wont pose a problem.

Sound
The sound is good. Voice actresses sound different, music plays at the right times so it doesn't fall silent. The music sounds how you expect it to sound and usually enforces the atmosphere, but it doesn't ever reach the level where I would say "wow this sounds amazing". But that's not needed, the music fits and does its job.

My general experience and opinions on the anime
I think that most of the little stories were really nice to watch. I did like some characters more than others, so episodes containing more girls I liked vs characters I didn't really care for would obviously be more fun for me. But every episode was fun to watch. The conclusion of each episode would always give me the feeling I wasn't wasting time. Eventhough it's predictable at times just experiencing the stories was good enough for me.

The next section will be a comparison with similar healing anime. So you can see how I think GF relates to them.

The Aria series (the Animation, Natural and Origination) and Non Non Biyori are better in my eyes. Aria follows a couple of characters going on "adventure" or experiencing something amazing every episode. Aria had a nice and consistent pacing which fit the anime perfectly. It also had music which stood out positively enforcing the mood/atmosphere a lot better than GF. Also Aria was more touching in general while like in GF not trying to go overboard with drama. Aria was a wonderful experience, whereas GF was merely very nice.
Non Non Biyori is similar to GF in cuteness in art style. It also is comedic, but Non Non Biyori does the comedy better. Non Non Biyori also has more screen time for the characters giving them a deeper character.
Both anime have a higher emphesis on art. Both of them have tried to put the scenery in detail. While Aria is older and the art I guess outdated, it was good enough for me to fill in the amazingness of the scenery with what they provided me.

But all hope isn't lost! It's still better than some in my eyes! Keep in mind that I haven't finished Gochuumon wa Usagi Desu ka? (Gochuumon), K-ON second season and Hanayamata. Actually all 3 of them have the same reason why I haven't been able to finish them. They all try to shove down your throat that the girls are cute and moe. This is reflected in what happens in the anime. In Hanayamata for example there's this girl that keeps tripping over and falling flat on her face. If it happens it's fine. But when it happens for no reason it annoys me. Secondly they put the emphesis on it and put it in the center of attention. While it might not be annoying to some of you, to me it seems as if they're trying to hide their lack of content with some kind of filler. Again this might not be bad if it's used in the right context or change the mood, but when it happens so something happens it annoys me. GF doesn't do this. In GF the girls all do what they normally would. Do they do it in a cute way? Well the director lets us decided wether we think it's cute or not. This makes the show a lot more enjoyable for me. So basically GF let's us decided what we think of things rather than forcing us to adopt his opinion.
K-ON! is a step up in art and story compared to Hanayamata. Gochuumon is a a couple of steps up in art compared to... well anything else mentioned but story-wise it's not that awesome. But unfortunately I couldn't deal with the "I present you lots of cuteness, accept that it's cute and deal with it" attitude. So if you're actually fine with an overdose of cuteness you might like the 3 above mentioned series (and Kiniro Mosaic) better than GF.

Reasons to watch:
Wanting to enjoy a relaxed 20 minutes and feel good afterwards.
Liking cute girls.

Reasons not to watch:
Effectively no plot.
Low progress.
Low development of characters.
No top quality art.
Sometimes not fluent animation.
Not liking some voice actresses.
Predictablity.
Kokomi's overly sized udders (I still don't understand why her breasts seem so huge).

I hope you got an idea wether you should watch it or not. In the end it really boils down to wether you only want to relax and watch that episode and feel good at the end, without any expectation of grandness.
Anyway my final verdict for GF is an 8. This means I enjoyed it quite a bit. There are definately better things out there, but I don't regret watching Girlfriend (Kari).

Girlfriend (Kari)/(Beta)

An anime about a large cast of high school girls living out their lives. Yes, it’s very slice of life and yes, the girls are all absolutely adorable.

It’s really hard to talk about the cast of girls, in 12 episodes we meet at least 20 different characters, heck it’s probably over 30. There are a lot of girls so it makes it incredibly hard to remember even 1/4th of them. Fortunately for the viewers, there are only a handful of girls that are focused on; such as the beautiful gymnast Kokomi Shiina, or the French transfer student Lemaire Chloe. These two girls ... are in most episodes and make it easy to remember who they are. We also have Sakurai Akane, Mochizuki Erena and Murakami Fumio, more girls that appear in most episodes.

The best way to describe Girlfriend (Beta) is to imagine Kiniro Mosaic, take away all the really cute scenes, make the characters look older and slow the pace down; you end up with Girlfriend (Beta) and it’s actually a lot of fun. The episodes are in an episodic form, the stories are all very much drama-free and relaxing, and the girls are adorable and very cute. There are heartwarming episodes and it’s all very much a feel good show.

One of the great things about the anime in general is how all the girls feel different and most of them are cliché free. We don’t have one girl who’s the smartest, the best at sports and is also coveted by both the purest form of love and the boys, things like that don’t exist. Every girl has some type of flaw, though things of that nature are never really explained in-depth either, you have this sense that the girls are multi-faceted, which is an absolute huge + to see in any type of anime. If you watch Girlfriend (Beta), it’s because you really want to slow down time and just enjoy the girls and their antics.

As a note: there are no ecchi scenes and no skin is unnecessarily exposed, it’s safe for kids to watch! Another note: The cast consists entirely of girls, no male exists; well they do, but they never talk and are just drawn in the background to give “life” to the school, but it’s about girls and the show is probably aimed for girls too; which makes the title for the anime weird, you assume Girlfriend (Beta) will consist of dating and things like that, but nope, the title comes from a mobile dating sim game; just using the source for the characters for the anime.

The art style, well it’s very simple, I guess bland even. The colors are cute though, and the girls are drawn in a way that makes them look extra cute, blemishes and all, so very attractive. In-fact, even with the simple backgrounds, the girls alone make up for it entirely, which I think is really important, since there are so many of them too. The animation is of decent quality too I believe; once again, because there is no focus on the background art, it’s all about the girls and as such, works really well. I can’t say I had any issues with the animation while I was watching.

Music: I’d go with average - good. I can’t say I remember much of the music that was played, aside from the OP and ED, and when the OP is used mid episode. There is BGM involved, but I think most scenes can live without it and none of the scenes required much either, it’s a really slow anime so…. music could have taken a back seat and I’d still enjoy what I watched. Though it doesn’t mean the music is bad either, just that I didn’t notice it as much as I probably should.

Overall I really enjoyed Girlfriend (Beta). It reminded me of Kiniro Mosaic, we have a student who speaks in broken Japanese (Still one of the cutest things ever) and the slow pace of the show in a high school setting was really nice and relaxing. The cast of characters are great and because they’re not full of clichés, makes it easy to appreciate them all. I also liked the variety included; there was even an android girl! How cool is that? (Very)

Well this show honestly only has one redeeming quality... It's cute as hell. Like honestly the cutest thing you'll ever watch. Allthough it's not the most memorable show you'll ever watch it's pretty funny at times and there isn't a minute where you don't feel the need to let a huge awwww.

Don't get fooled by the romance tag this show gets everywhere though. Cause there is none ^^

Not perfect but as the whole thing is just about 4,5 hours total still worth watching.

Also this Anime has made me question my emotions cause there it made me cry at times by doing nothing exept be ... adorable ^^