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It's basically a better Hell Girl (Jigoku Shoujo). If you liked Hell Girl you can just stop reading this review right now and go read Funouhan, because you will definitely like it.

As it's episodic, characters don't need to be fleshed out too much. Aside from Usobuki, there is one other detective character that persists between chapters, but he's hardly fleshed out at all. There isn't much actual character depth in this series. it's basically all about Usobuki and his very mysterious character.

All the females are drawn the same way. The art is amazing and very atmospheric, but the women have some serious sameface. I'm just ... glad none of them persist between chapters or else I'd get confused really fast.

At first, the manga starts off with actually clever outcomes, but it very quickly slogs off and stops being clever just for the sake of telling the story of whoever is the focus of the current chapter. It was very disappointing and it's easily why I voted the overall manga a 7 instead of an 8 or even a 9. The whole draw of the first chapter was the interesting and clever outcome Usobuki plotted for someone, but after that it basically just turns into unoriginal hypnosis. Literally vampire eyes.

All-in-all, it's a fun manga to read. Usobuki is a fun, carefree homicidal character who prefers having fun with people rather than getting muddy in morality and what's right or wrong. There's really not much to explain about the good aspects, it's a simple story with ironic, funny (usually in a dark humor way than not) outcomes for the people short-sighted enough to ask Usobuki to kill someone for them. It's a pretty addicting manga.

I came into this anime with zero expectations, I knew this had almost nothing to do with Lucky Star and that the humor wasn't going to be amazing, I was more curious than anything. The only assumption I made was that it was going to be as cute and situational as Lucky Star, but I was dead wrong.

This anime has a very unique setting of being unbearably depressing while not actually trying to be. You can tell it was trying to make humor out of being relatable to budgeting families and people with not much extra money to spend, but the entire thing is just ... one, long drudge of the protagonist being miserable and unhappy. This anime actually put me in a worse mood than when I started, wholly for the fact that it's that much of a downer. It's especially ironic considering Lucky Star featured at least a few jokes about characters mentioning something happy and then stating several negative things, ruining the mood for comedic effect. Because that's what this anime is, except without the punchline.

In every aspect besides the story, it's a great anime. The animation is relatively beautiful and smooth, the sound is pretty good, the characters are visually appealing, it's got all the surface charm of Lucky Star, if not even a little bit better than Lucky Star's production quality.

If you're a huge fan of Lucky Star like I am, I'd recommend this, not because it's "like" Lucky Star or even has anything to do with it, but just because it almost "feels" like Lucky Star. In an apt comparison, this is sort of the tofu version of Lucky Star. My only warning would be to keep something handy for when you're done watching it to restore your mood, because you definitely will come out of this feeling just kind of bad and abused. Besides that, this is definitely an anime you can afford to skip. It's only really worth a watch for curiosity's sake and just for the fact that you can say you watched it.