Horimiya: Piece

After watching the first season of Horimiya, despite enjoying it from start to end, I'm sure at least some of us were also left with a slight sense of incompleteness.

The nagging feeling that there were some...missing pieces, if you will.

From a visual standpoint there was nothing to complain about, the main couple was great, and it's exactly the kind of low-stakes mainly fluff romance that would normally get full marks from romance enjoyers. But even so - some pieces are bound to go missing (okayi'm sorryi'llstopnow) when the truck carrying them has a space shuttle engine in the back and is flying at a ... breakneck average speed of about 10 chapters/episode, and their absence was strongly felt by many, especially in the latter half - where dissatisfaction with the not-always-successful attempts of the adaptation to introduce the large side cast of Horimiya to the audience was fairly common.

But what's said is done, and Horimiya is over. So what could this new cour possibly bring to the table at this point? Well, it brings exactly what it says in the title.

Horimiya : The Missing Pieces is not a sequel, and it's not a remake either. It is basically a...sidequel. It goes down exactly the same road as the original - but it leaves the space shuttle truck-kun in its parking lot, and walks with us at a pleasant, leisurely pace through the daily lives of the Horimiya cast.

Now, what's the point of that, you may ask? We already know the outcome of everything. We saw the graduation. So why?

Well, this part is just my opinion of course - but this approach is exactly what allowed the greatest thing about the Horimiya manga - the amazing chemistry between each and every character and the way they all flawlessly bounce off each other - to truly shine, creating something even better in the process.

The side characters, which basically existed somewhere in a limbo between relevance and insignificance in the main show, came to life this season in the best way possible through various skits featuring them in situations mainly unrelated to the progress of their romantic relationships.
One skit focuses on a girl realizing in horror that she'll most likely have to babysit her friends for the rest of her life if she wants them to survive making breakfast, in the next two the show suddenly becomes a Cute Boys Doing Cute Things show with gay undertones, and from there we go on to showcase the dire need of the entire Hori family for professional psychological help. Each of the skits is hilarious, most of them are unhinged, a lot of them are sweet, and they have some of the absolute best character interactions I have seen in my many years of watching anime.
And of course, HoriMiya themselves don't take a backseat - both of them, often together, participate in this madness. There's plenty of sweet moments between them as a couple, and their relationships with the rest of the cast are explored in depth as well.

As for my review of the "sidequel" approach itself - while it might not have the structural fluidity of a normal 24-episode adaptation, the reality is that such an adaptation is not always possible on the production side. And as far as alternatives go, this approach, to me, is an absolutely brilliant idea which I hope gains traction for previously finished Slice of Life shows. After all, who would say no to an extra season of the daily shenanigans of the characters they love?

To sum it up, if you liked Horimiya's characters even a little bit, this is an absolute must-watch. 10/10 to the idea, and an even stronger 10/10 to its execution. Thank you to everyone involved in this for making these 3 months a genuinely more enjoyable time for me.

A lot of us were confused when we saw Horimiya getting a new season. Hadn't it already concluded? Horimiya rose to immense popularity and it left fans looking for more, especially manga readers who were infuriated by the fact the adaptation only received 12 episodes when it could have easily gotten 24 plus. As a standalone season, the original Horimiya was honestly a great watch if we exclude the fact that they cut out a bunch of chapters. It honestly felt very seamless, probably because they focused specifically on Hori and Miyamura outside of the extensive side cast. That's where Missing Pieces comes in. It ... shines light on the side cast, which I always thought was the strength of Horimiya, but glaring weaknesses are present.

I feel that some of the more casual Horimiya fans will be disappointed by this series. The diehards will love to see their series animated no matter what, but those who enjoyed Horimiya as a romance will be disappointed. I think that you would be very hard-pressed to call Missing Pieces a romance. It's almost exclusively slice-of-life, with comparatively little Hori and Miyamura in comparison. On the romance topic, I want to express one of my criticisms of the series. Nothing happens. Yoshikawa, Ishikawa, Sakura, and Iura, these guys are stuck in an eternal love polygon. There are so many advances, especially with Sakura in the main series but nothing ever happens outside of Remi and Sengoku and Hori/Miyamura. One of my absolute favorite moments in the original series was the exchanges between Sengoku and Remi exchanging books that they thought the other would like. The author chose to keep everything static and while all the characters are constantly frolicking about, laughing and smiling. By no means does it feel satisfying. Missing Pieces is adapting chapters that were skipped, and some of those chapters are from earlier in the series, and it just kinda hurts to see Sakura laughing around Ishikawa when we know that she has feelings for him. When the chapter was originally drawn, we weren't supposed to know about her feelings so it doesn't feel natural. It was moments like this that made me feel like missing pieces was just a cash grab, too little too late.

Knowing that this is a chill slice-of-life primarily, it changes how I would go about recommending it. As mentioned previously, I like Horimiya's side cast, I think the characters are generally really likable. It keeps a good balance of alternating in and out of the school setting. I think the comedy is flat and euphoric though. When characters try to be funny, the voice actors are doing too much and the jokes are often overused, boring, flat, and stale (except the one teacher who likes high schoolers who was funny [I don't condone this], I wish he would have gotten together with the female teacher). I have a problem with the disposition of the characters, they all seem overly happy all the time. To put this in context, you know how guilty people who are bad at lying act overly agreeable and crack jokes a lot? That's how I felt about the cast sometimes. I personally like most of the characters (Remi, Sengoku, Ishikawa, Yoshikawa, Sakura, Iura) even if I don't like Hori and Miyamura that much, which made this for a generally enjoyable watch despite being boring and cringe at times.
Final Score: 7/10

Horimiya is very weird because when you look at it from afar it looks like a shoujo, when you read the synopsis it is literally the same as a generic shoujo, but when you see where it was published it is in a shonen magazine, and I know Horimiya isn't the only example that can be said that it looks for a different demographic than what it actually is, but really, Horimiya is like a very watered down version of Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou.

The problem with Horimiya is obviously how the premise is good, but it doesn't know how to work it out due to ... the very simplistic and dumb "secrets" the protagonists have, and in fact, I think the most uninteresting part of Horimiya is the main couple, and I can confirm that after having watched Hormiya: Piece. You see, these secrets definitely aren’t worth covering up, or at the very least Hori's secret isn't a secret at all? Her being a nice sister that takes care of chores is definitely not a secret, even less something worth covering up, while Miyamura's is more understandable as he doesn't want to be seen as a criminal but still, some tattoos aren't the end of the world given that plays no role in the series. This clearly tried to take KareKano's premise and do it again, but as the author didn't know how he was supposed to do it, he just plastered something very inconsequential.

Horimiya, despite being a romcom with a clear main couple, is also very clearly an ensemble cast, so last season focusing mainly in the main couple and cutting most of the scenes of other characters clearly hurt the series, so they clearly tried to fix it with this season, and while I can say it finally accomplished what it set out to do, it doesn't take the fact that these characters aren't people whom I can care about. I'm more surprised it took until Horimiya: Piece to see more of their development, I remember seeing a meme that said that Horimiya was "The development of the side characters comes separately: The Anime" and that is the truth, and while I like the idea of making some new episodes to adapt stuff that were left out from the first season, I wouldn't expect a whole season worth of content, at that point you could have simply made 2 seasons adapting the series as you should and not what came out from this series.

The series looks the same as the previous season, so you don't have to worry about the supposed quality of the show, as it's just your regular barely watchable series that comes from Cloverworks. For what Horimiya is worth, this season is unironically better than the main series and can be funny at times, before I didn't actually like the Horimiya characters, but I got a little liking to Sengoku here and I can't believe how little he appeared the previous season, stupid jokes like his arm exploding just so he didn't have to clean the pool actually made me chuckle, unlike the previous season which was full of unfunny jokes.

Thank you for reading.