A couple of people that I call friends recommended this anime to me telling me how great the story is and how fantastic the characters are. When I watched Haruhi the first episode was a real shocker, it was so bad that I immediately wanted to turn it off and throw the DVD away and watch something else, but not wanting to disappoint them I kept on watching, so I put the first episode in fast forward, although that didn't really change the fact that it looked terrible and was maybe written by a 3 year old.
But anyway, enough ragging on the introduction, let's take a look at the scores.
Story: 3
The story of Haruhi is shown in a non-chronological order, it consists of 6 story episodes randomly thrown between 8 filler episodes. Those 8 filler episodes don't actually matter to the overall anime and show no character development or help the story advance in any way. In chronological order those 8 episodes happen after the 6 story episodes and the only reason I can see for their inclusion in the anime is to stretch the length of the anime, since the 6 story episodes can easily be fit into the time frame of a single movie.
The 6 story episodes show a decent although more or less generic story. It has it's moments and I can certainly enjoy those 6 episodes, however the inclusion of the meaningless filler episodes and the terrible opening episode (the one where they are making that movie) detract from the story and make the viewing a much less pleasurable thing for me.
All of this leads me to conclude that the anime has a rather poor story, since 8 of the 14 episodes don't have any meaning to the anime and what remains is an atleast competent athough generic story. So, a score of 3 on the story part.
Art: 8
The art is of a high standard and the anime certainly looks good, however the visual design of a lot of things in the anime (like the characters) is rather generic and I feel that the makers could have done a lot more then what is shown.
Sound: 7
The sound is well executed and the songs are nice. In terms of sound effects they could have done a lot more, since they could also have done more with the visuals (they usually match).
Characters: 2
The character design in the anime is rather pathetic. They used basic character templates that are as overused as can be. Heck, they use character templates that actually seem to be imported from a generic "H-Game turned Anime" like say Green Green or Fate/stay Night.
Those basic templates are: Spineless Male Main character (Kyon), Easy Achievement Girl (A girl in a H-Game that you can't go wrong with and has the most direct part to the H scenes, obviously I mean Haruhi with this), Emotionally Distant, intellectual girl with glasses (Yuki), Bigbreasted airhead (Mikuru), the little sister (Kyon's sister obviously) and the possibly gay supporting male character and main character's best friend (Itsuki).
Besides the generic overused character templates the anime shows little character development, with which I mean that the character development is limited to less then half the episodes in the anime. In the story episodes there is a good amount of character development, I would even go as far as saying that those 6 episodes have too much of it, and story. I feel that they rushed those 6 episodes and jammed too much into it.
With all of this I can only say that they produced rather dreadful characters, badly designed and straight from an H-Game with rather inconsistent amounts of character development. A dreadful score here.
Enjoyment: 3
An anime consisting for more then half of the episodes out of filler (heck, even Naruto and Dragonball Z had a smaller percentage of filler), with generic characters, the most horrible opening episode ever seen in an anime and basically everything I mentioned above this, you can guess that I certainly didn't enjoy it very much. A 3 is all it can get.
Overall: 5
All of this amounts to a rather mediocre anime in my opinion. If they removed those 8 filler episodes and worked out the story a bit more it would have been a much better anime, even with the substandard character design.
After this huge rant I still cannot imagine the reason behind the hype surrounding this anime. But then again, something as generic and stretched beyond comprehension as Dragonball Z also still has a huge following.
I guess this will be one mystery that I won't be able to solve...
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