why do people dislike this show?

RyaReisender said:
I've currently watching it too.

When the anime originally aired, I quit it at episode 6 or so and gave it a 3/10 rating, but some weeks ago I watched Toradora! and it became my favorite anime of all times. As Shakugan no Shana was one of the top recommendations (and also mostly same staff) I decided to give it another try and after watching Toradora! I suddenly enjoyed watching it and increased by rating to 7/10.

Still can't bring myself to give it a better rating, though.

Why?

Well I think the drama and romance in this anime is pretty good. The character emotions are there, especially the "Good hearted boy teaches girl that she has feelings too" aspect. It's still not perfectly executed, but Shana is cute so I can kind of overlook that.

However, the supernatural and combat aspects of the anime really just feel bad. There are many supernatural aspects introduced in the anime, but there are only a little bit explained and then there's no progress in that part of the story for forever. It's just too slow and the anime misses the opportunity to throw in tiny bits of explanations here and there that would keep you interested in the mystery. Combat is pretty big let down too. There's often a huge emotional build-up for every single villain, but when the confrontation comes it's usually very anti-climatic. Combat feels boring and unbalanced. You never feel like "Yeah because of this trick, she could finally defeat the villain", it always just feels arbitrary that now this one attack worked while the others were easily deflected.

I really want to keep watching just to see more Shana+Yuji scenes, but I can definitely understand that when someone watched for the mystery and combat, he will dislike this.

Anyway the average score of the anime is still 7.62 which actually seems to be pretty accurate.

And with Toradora! you can see that if the team focuses on drama and romance only, they can make a much better anime.