NHK: ni Youkoso, a psychological comedy filled with tragedy is a tale about a socially withdrawn college dropout and his struggle with the encounters he wishes not to have. The story itself isn't too complicated and anyone should be able to follow it very easily but the themes can get pretty heavy at times if you haven't at least had some first hand experience with some of them, though I suspect many mature enough to even decide to view this will have already.
I have a few gripes with the show that I found to be decently displeasing though, these being the main reason I'm actually writing this right now. Others may not find any problems here but I definitely found it impacting my viewing experience more than I would have liked to.
One of them being the art. Now I'm not usually one to complain when it comes to art I can usually take it all in and just be absorbed the atmosphere, but what I can't stand are inconsistencies, NHK had a lot of them. I'm not sure if some of the episodes were budgeted with major differences compared to others or they had different animators throw their spin on them but there were definitely more than a few episodes where it felt like the animation took a dive off the deep end. Severe lack of shadowing, what appeared to be some scenes actually lowering in pixel density and even a super bland colour palate that was completely unfitting for the scene. Not all of it is bad though, majority of the art is fitting to the scene's mood and some of it even much better than expected.
The second and more important reason being the mesh between comedy and tragedy. As I mentioned earlier, there are some pretty heavy themes that this show deals with and for the most part it does it excellently, what it doesn't do so well/consistently is transition out of this. There are often times throughout the show where constant despair is a large part of the emotion in the scene, we are then mistreated to a very jarring comedic transition that for the most part left me feeling that the despairing feeling felt prior was very wasted. With that being said, the scenes where comedy wasn't an interruption were done extremely well, the inner dialogues amplified this feeling nicely.
NHK: ni Youkoso tackles some social, mental and issues nicely and when they are resolved I'm sure you'll even find yourself smiling, I know I did. If you can get past the issues I've outlined above and are of a mature mindset I'm sure you'll find the show to be quite enjoyable.
