Code0018 said:whelp that was the end of that. Overall, yeh Hyouka was an ok watch. Definitely a bit rough around the edges but then again nothing is perfect, ending wise i honestly felt so mixed about.
Story wise, it was pretty straight forward. We have 200IQ
Hachiman Oreki Houtarou that has a chilled layed back life (something i honestly wish i had as well lol) until he meets Eru Chitanda a very curious, kawaii, maybe slightly over the top but also extremely rich and clever girl who almost quite literally flips his world upside down. Chitanda almost infectious love of mystery and solving them was a massive positive effect on Oreki and really opened him up as a person.
Overall the story was very very interesting in terms that it wasn't the usual SOL anime. The anime itself focused on the Mystery genre, executing it extremely well. The mystery, how they start, how Oreki examines it, then solving it and the ending result all felt extremely well down. The mystery themselves were very very well designed, they could be as simple as an announcement or an old memory of something, but the journey we then go on crunching theories, the "who what when where why's", why this dosen't work compared to that really brought you in as a viewer in my opinion and had me also trying to solve the mystery at the end. All the end results of the mystery's had me satisfied, i didn't dislike any of the results and most off the time was like "ahhhhhh it was (or because of) 'x' now it all makes sense". The way they actually present the mystery's with the animations that varied between paper origami to simple stick men figures was so, simplistic but so well detailed and designed and helped to explain the mystery in so much further detail.
One weak point i will say is the SOL romance and every day life aspect, felt quite dry. We never saw the characters beyond the school, maybe a few times at Chitanda's house and at the shrine but that was about it. Although it's not mandatory to have the characters have a group shopping day or movie day it did feel like it was something fundamentally missing from this anime (still mad we never saw the party they through for solving the Hyouka case). The romance was, there. We see no official love relationships between couples but is constantly hinted at. One thing i will say about this anime's execution of romance was, did we reaaaaallllly need an entire episode dedicated to Satoshi and Mayaka's relationship that we all know is a thing but they decided to then complicated it for 25 minutes and then loop to were they started at the end, making me even more confused on what there deal is? Honestly a Chitanda and Oreki relationship dedicated episode would of been 100x better in my opinion, not because i prefer them more, but because then we could of really seen how much of of Oreki has changed since meeting Chitanda in episode 1.
It was obvious Kyoto wanted to make this a very mystery focused anime, which in my opinion affected its ending quite a lot as it felt like Kyoto forgot that the basis for this anime was a SLICE OF LIFE ANIME. The starting point, the building blocks of this anime was from SOL genre yet that ending felt more like a
"shit, we are at the end and can't think of any more plots for another mystery to end this anime, ah but we're already balls deep in the genre! Quick lets try to 'slice of life' it for the end, wait how do we do that again? isn't this is a mystery anime? uhhh i know, second shrine scene! And lets skip almost all the scenery and make the camera effects look like our guy is on LSD and drunk while having a stroke and finally make the ending really abrupt by giving the views false hope they'll see a massive relationship build between Oreki and Chitanda!"
all in all, Hyouka truly is a different anime but i feel like it sometimes has an identity crisis and forgets a thing or two. But the mystery genre this anime did, did in my opinion out way most of the bad.
Considering the series began in 2001. It's impressive how Oreki came out 10 years before Hikigaya , there weren't many characters like that back then from my knowledge , the whole sharp loner or lazy guy started coming later