After being asked by a good friend of mine to "check out this new Kyoto-Ani anime" and "whether it's good or not" I came to the conclusion that I had to watch this show and oh surprisingly it ended rather recently too so I quickly went on the case and started watching this show from episode 1 to 12 and let me tell you that it was one of the worst decisions of my life. (This is my opinion - no offense.)
So first of all, let me tell you my story: I've been a great fan of Kyoto Animation after watching a few of its most well-known shows such as K-ON, Haruhi Suzumiya, Clannad, etc and they all left me good memories. They all had decent soundtracks, CGs, character designs and art and the comedy factor always kicked in at right moments. What about Kanata? NOPE. This show started with a very confusing episode where you just start off with a supposedly "ordinary human being" in a supposedly ordinary world where our protagonist gets stabbed in the heart by a "cute little girl in glasses". Okay, that's fine I've seen that many times before... Getting stabbed in a fantasy world is something ordinary - nothing new here. But then, we return to his ordinary life as if nothing ever happened without an ounce of an explanation so far.
The first episode is basically nothing but a small introduction of a few characters without any depth. They introduced many terms but didn't bother explaining them anyhow, so you're like "Okay, they might explain it later but wait, what's with this "youmu" thing, what IS a "Youmu"? Oh, so they're supposedly "monsters" that take various shapes depending on human emotions... All right that's fine, but wait why do you act as if there's nothing wrong with living with supernatural creatures that attack human beings from time to time I mean why are you standing around as if there's nothing dangerous about them? If there're zombies roaming around in town, shouldn't people be worried? Aren't you an ordinary human being? Ooh so later on, we discover that he's half youmu... 'Kay. And wait a second, where do they come from? WHY ARE THEY HERE IN THE FIRST PLACE? Answer? "..."
NEXT - a new term gets introduced: "spirit world warriors", wtf are those? We didn't get any proper explanation in the whole show (from the beginning to the end) but we can deduce that they're human beings with some kind of spiritual energy that fights youmus for the sake of making a living with it or simply to protect people from getting harmed and that their "spiritual energy" allows them to see youmus with the naked eye - wait isn't this a complete rip-off of Bleach?!
Next we have our characters:
Kabara Akihito - A half-youmu half-human protagonist that is immortal and has a pretty hardcore fetish for bespectacled females that wouldn't mind spending a few hours talking about nothing but glasses...
Kurimaya Mirai - A cute little glasses-wearing klutz that has the ability to bend her own blood to her will.
Nase Mitsuki - The club leader, a spirit warrior from a rich and well-known family that has an odd-behavior of teasing people in strange manners yet doesn't really do much in the whole show while still having a LOT of screen time and,
Nase Hiromi - Her brother, also a spirit warrior that also has a strange fetish, namely a little sister complex (he's also some kind of weirdo like our protagonist that could fantasize about his little sister eternally).
This makes up our main characters. The side characters aren't even worth mentioning, because both main and side characters have near-zero development and depth that spent EPISODES chatting about meaningless things with random things showing up here and there and forced comedy everywhere.
This show consists of 12 episodes of "I have no idea what the hell is going on". No character has a clear background, nothing is really explained - we know nearly nothing about any of the characters - their conversations are meaningless (99% of the time) - we have no idea what's the story about (the show wasn't meant to be some kind of slice of life but IT IS- it's supposed to be SERIOUS but it's NOT [a huge mess overall]) - random things pop up here and there without any logical explanation like how our protagonist randomly teleports to Mirai at some point (our little bespectacled cute girl)... Oh there's more to the randomness factor, from all the shows I've seen, people with some kind of super power or weapon tend to have RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEIR ACTS, our supposedly "last of her kind" girl at the beginning doesn't even have the resolve to kill a "ghost" haunting her apartment (nor does she have the courage to face it) yet she had the resolve to kill a human being in her past and stab a random guy?
The show even tried adding the romance factor in it but it had no depth whatsoever so you're just standing there and be like "wut". Other than the horribly confusing story and wood-carved characters their art and sound were rather enjoyable - I expected nothing less from Kyoto-Ani. I gave it 3 for the story, 3 for the characters, 8 for the art and 8 for the sound. I didn't really enjoy the show because of how BAD this show is. It's a 5 overall (it's as lenient as I can get).
In conclusion, this show had a lot of potential - supernatural shows tend to be really "special" in their own ways but this show is just a rip-off of many things without any proper "uniqueness" that isolates it from its counterparts. The lack of depth, the useless conversations, the lack of explanations, the lack of THOUGHTS (basically everything happened because it happened) had left me a really bitter aftertaste - I really hope Kyoto-Ani was on crack during the whole creation process because this was a total waste of effort, a COMPLETE HUMILIATION - it's a shame really. I would never recommend this show to anyone - it may of had a lot of beautiful CGs, art and ending theme but I would honestly take a banana or potato over this show any day.
