Reviews

Dec 28, 2014
Mixed Feelings
"No matter how much I keep lowering my expectations, I still end up disappointed"
That one sentence sums up the ongoing experience of watching this anime from start to finish.

Grisaia no Kajitsu is undoubtedly one of the most successful and popular visual novels in recent years. It is a game praised for having a godlike character cast, excellent production value, great comedy, extreme lewdness and an abnormal amount of psychological depth and serious storylines for a harem series. Sounds like the perfect recipe for something to make an anime out of, right? Well three and a half years after the original visual novel was released, it finally happened. However unlike its source material, this anime adaptation of Kajitsu fails in essentially every single department other than the animation, and instead serves as one of the biggest train wrecks I've seen in a long time.

Grisaia no Kajitsu is the story of a little group of teenagers with problems. Said problems are generally some kind of psychological trauma or other type of darker past that in the end results in the person being unable to fit into society anymore. Introducing Mihama Academy, a specially funded high-school dedicated solely in order to educate students that find themselves unable to go to any "normal" schools any longer.

And as a result, they're all a bunch of crazy people. The characters of Grisaia are very unique and completely wacky. Because of their complicated backgrounds, not a single one of them is acting like a normal person, and consequently they give you an extremely unpredictable flow of events whenever they interact with each other. Together they make up one of the most unique setup of main characters you'll ever see, and that's exactly what makes them so likable. Unfortunately however, this anime doesn't give them much of a chance to showcase it.

Case in point: this anime is rushed. Incredibly rushed. Actually the word rushed is not even enough to explain just how much of a complete and utter mess the pacing of this so-called "adaptation" truly is. The mere idea of trying to cover about 80 hours' worth of visual novel content in a 13-episode anime is nothing short of ridiculous to begin with but here it was actually attempted, and unsurprisingly it failed miserably. The first three episodes show some promise, when the anime is merely showing the hilarious everyday antics that the characters are pulling off during their school days. After that however, as soon as the story gets into its serious elements, things rapidly start derailing, and it *never ever stops derailing*.

Michiru's and Makina's routes skip huge amounts of content, leaving out key plot elements and just leaves you feeling extremely confused and unsatisfied as a viewer. You also immediately lose all sense of time as sometimes the story pulls a sudden time skip out of nowhere and tries to proceed as if everything's all fine and dandy, despite having just left out several hours' worth of story. Sachi's and Yumiko's routes are even worse, they sincerely get *one* episode each to cover their *entire* story arcs. We're talking 10+ hours of content in *one* episode each. Since this feat is pretty much impossible, the production team's so-called "solution" to this is to simply flat-out cut away 90% of the story and pretend that the rest of the plot just doesn't exist, and unbelievably enough they on top of that even take the time to add totally nonsensical original content of their own into the mix. Especially Yumiko's route might just get the award as the worst adaptation of anything I've ever seen to be perfectly blunt. Finally Amane's route which is generally the most popular and praised one of the visual novel is fortunately also the only one that receives some sort of tolerable adaptation here, but sadly it's way too late to be enough to save this disaster of an anime.

The ones responsible for this whole mess are none other than Studio 8bit; famous for "illustrious" works such as Walkure Romanze as well as both seasons of Infinite Stratos. It would not be an exaggeration to say that people did not have a whole lot of faith in them even before Grisaia began airing, and unfortunately as it turns out; that was not an incorrect mindset at all. If there's one thing I have to give them credit for though, it's that the animation quality of this anime is still very high despite everything else. The characters and the environments both look great. Fans of the Monogatari Series will also notice the awfully familiar-looking character designs, which is quite simply explained by the fact that they are done by the same artist. The anime also utilizes a pretty interesting extreme-widescreen resolution that probably makes the show look a lot better if you have a really wide monitor.

Another thing 8bit apparently decided to randomly add to this show... was fanservice. Now don't get me wrong, Grisaia is incredibly lewd even in its original form but there's a very clear difference here. What the visual novel primarily contains is a myriad of hilarious sexual innuendos that were all clearly written by someone with taste and a good sense of humour. The anime however has virtually none of this. Instead, it goes with the age-old approach of throwing in random panty shots whenever possible, regardless of where or when. The problem is that this is not just a generic ecchi series, so when these spontaneous panty shots are shoved into the camera during life-or-death situations when the rest of the story is actually trying to be serious, it doesn't exactly feel very appropriate. Did the animators never stop to think that this might be *somewhat* out of place? Like really?

The voice acting is all-round very impressive. The same cast used in the original game makes a comeback for the anime and helps liven up their respective characters immensely. Especially Makina's and Michiru's respective voice actresses make a phenomenal performance in my opinion given how incredibly wacky those two roles in particular are. It's just a shame that the anime doesn't really give them a whole lot of time to showcase it since it's so incredibly rushed. The soundtrack there is very little to say about however: while the OST does its job at enhancing the atmosphere in more or less every scene, it is definitely nothing memorable either. The opening and various ending themes are the same story: decent, but nothing special.

Overall, the production value is solid but it's nowhere even close to making up for how incredibly butchered the story in this anime is. If you've played the original visual novel, then watching this anime is nothing but painful. It's like a guilt trip where you start every new episode holding a slight glimmer of hope that things might get better, but end up just as disappointed as the week before every single time. Seeing such a great source material dissected and ripped apart like this just hurts, and I wouldn't recommend anyone who liked the visual novel to watch this anime for their own sakes, at least not if they're expecting a legitimate adaptation. Though if you just think of it as some sort of fan fiction or similar, then it might be okay. If you have never played the visual novel however nor plan to, then this particular issue will not exist as you won't have anything to compare the anime to, so the show is not quite as bad in that case. However then you're still faced with the issue of the blitzkrieg pacing of this show which ends up eagerly skipping past its own plot points, and as a result you'll have some serious problems trying to figure out just what the hell is going on every so often. You might not be aware of what the holes are leaving out, but you'll still sure as hell notice that there are in fact holes more or less everywhere. It's just that blatantly obvious.

This anime has been the source of a lot of pain and agony for many people over the last few months. In the end despite all that, I'd still say it's a good thing that it came into existence, if only for the reason of perhaps driving up more attention for the visual novel and hopefully getting some more people to try that out instead. At least that's the only thing I can think of as anything good the Grisaia anime might bring us in the end, because at least on its own it remains one of the absolute worst adaptations in recent memory.

And lastly we can only pray that 8bit are going to do a slightly better job at adapting the remaining two parts of the Grisaia trilogy (Meikyuu and Rakuen) which have now been confirmed that they're *also* going to be adapted, starting spring 2015. In theory this should be a much easier job to pull off since they're significantly shorter in comparison, but I still think we should head into them with the lowest possible expectations this time around, just to be safe. It's the only way to make sure to avoid the never-ending spiral of disappointment that Kajitsu was.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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