Dec 4, 2014
Have you ever had that situation where you love the beginning of an anime but the rest of the series doesn’t turn out too well. You get disappointed and just want to forget all the things that were bad. That is how it was with Photokano for me.
This series is about Maeda Kazuya, a normal high school boy that receives a digital camera from his father. He starts to get interested in photographing which opens a lot of doors for him. During the series he comes across people he would never had talked to if it wasn’t for his newfound hobby.
The structure of
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this series is pretty simple. It starts off with four episodes of introduction where you get to meet all the characters. Then the series becomes arc based. This is when it becomes problematic. Every arc is focused on one of the girls that Maeda meets. During these arcs Maeda helps the girls with their problems and also starts a relationship with them. The problem here is that the arcs are very short. Most of them only last for one episode. This makes them very rushed. This structure also makes it feel like the story doesn’t progress so much.
The photo theme is very interesting and was the reason for me checking this series out. They did handle it pretty well although they could added a bit more of it. Again the bad structure prevents from doing this.
The main characters Maeda Kazuya isn’t that special of a character but he is likeable. He doesn’t have so much development or a backstory, but this works because the focus is more on the main girls. The girls are many. So many that I won’t take the time to talk about each one of them. The good thing about them is that even though they are so many they still have interesting and unique backstories. But then we do also have a problem with the amount of girls. As I said before the arcs is only one episode and that’s because every girls is going to have one. The lack of time makes them really rushed and the main character barley gets to start a relationship before he has to move on to the next girl. I think the series would have been better if it had a smaller cast of girls.
The series also have few supporting characters. These characters don’t get so much screen time because of the focus on the main girls. This is pretty disappointing because some of them were really good and funny. My favorite character of the series is Kudou Hiromichi, the leader of the photo club Maeda joins. He does only appear a few times during the series and most of his appearance comes from the previews which he narrates.
I don’t have so much to say about art and animation. It holds a good standard. My favorite part was how they did the photographing. It looked nice and beautiful. One of my favorite things about this series is the great feeling you get. You feel calm and relaxed. The biggest reason for this is the background music. It is always used at the right time and set such a good tone in the scene. The voice acting was good. There weren’t any performances I didn’t like. My favorite performance in this series came from Midorikawa Hikaru who played the character I talked about earlier, Kudou Hiromichi.
Photokano is a series that sets high expectations that it can't live up to. It follows the classic dating sim structure which is not a bad structure, but it has to be handled well. Photokano has a great intro but has a really bad structure. In this case it's the structure that decides if this series is very good or just good. This series would have worked out a lot better if it just were longer or had a smaller cast. Even with the bad structure the series has some interesting characters and it gives a really good feeling which is the first thing that comes to my mind when I think back on Photokano.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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