But for those of you not interested in watching the video, here's the text-version of my review:
At first glance, Yuyushiki seems to be about as standard as they come. There isn’t much of anything to the characters’ personalities outside of the basic Boke/Tsukomi slice-of-life relationship. And there’s nothing exciting or interesting about the setting, which really is just a highschool. But as I watched more, its unique traits began to shine through. Yuyushiki has a special sense of humor in the slice-of-life genre in that most of the jokes come right out of the dialogue between the characters. Most shows rely on putting their characters in bizarre situations or using an over-the-top animation style, but in Yuyushiki, the funniest scenes are just the characters sitting around a table and talking. A conversation may start ordinarily enough, but they quickly devolve into absurdity. Sometimes they’ll come up with really weird ideas, sometimes they get strangely profound, most of the time though, they just end in giggle fits over completely meaningless things. The dialogue is certainly weird and hilarious, but I was amazed to find that it was also uncannily realistic. The conversations sound like conversations between real people...or…at least real highschoolers. They go on tangents, they forget where they were going, they make small, inconsequential, remarks, they develop their own inside jokes. And there is never any sort of “end goal” in their conversations. They’re just enjoying talking to each other, regardless of how absurd or off-beat the conversation gets. I’ve never seen a show more accurately portray the sort of conversations I tend to have with my friends.
On top of the excellent dialogue, Yuyushiki boasts a great visual style. The character designs are unique and cute, but not excessive. The jokes are often accentuated with the help of some snappy editing, and the characters are endlessly expressive. Yuyushiki is particularly fond of playing with the eyes of its characters. Nearly every joke is accompanied by someone doing something weird with their eyes, which often makes me laugh more than the dialogue itself. It’s also clear that Yuyushiki put a great amount of care into the way the characters move. Sometimes it can be as simple as their body language while talking, but even the more movement-oriented scenes show a remarkable fluidity and realism in the animation. In particular, the legs and walk-cycles in this show are exceptionally well-animated. Which is just as well really, because the skirts are also exceptionally short. On that note, the show is relatively light on fan service, but not completely devoid of it. I suppose that could be either a pro or a con depending on your personal preference. Really, for a dialogue-centered show, I suppose it’s only logical that most of the fan service is in the dialogue. The group’s conversations will occasionally drift into lewd topics, but you rarely actually see much of anything lewd.
Yuyushiki is not without its faults, of course. There a lot of jokes that rely on word-play in Japanese. The subtitles I had tried their best to explain some of them. But there were still a large amount of jokes that simply failed to make it over the language barrier. Or at least I assume so. It’s either that, or some of the jokes just make literally no sense. By far my biggest complaint about the series however is the fact that the teacher in the series has the nickname of “Mom” from the students. I thought I’d get used to it, but the awkwardness of calling a teacher “Mom” continued to make me cringe slightly every single time throughout the whole series.
All in all, Yuyushiki isn't the best slice-of-life out there, but it is definitely not the worst. If you're a fan of slice-of-life and are looking for your next fix, then I highly recommend you watch Yuyushiki.
