Reviews

The Familiar of Zero is required viewing, not because it's particularly great, but because it will allow viewers to accurately gauge other anime's quality. All the tricks (the tsundere girl, the ordinary protagonist, the Casanova second guy, etc.) are all in their basic form here. That's hardly this show's fault for being made in 2006. I believe that a lot of shows looked that this series and imitated its elements without ever understanding WHY those elements were in the show to begin with. That the characters needed a reason to behave the way they behaved in a situation.

The show's premise revolves around a Kerr black hole of interactions between Louise and Saito (Her familiar). Unfortunately, it is impossible for me to compress my patience into 36 bytes or less because neither character warrants it all that much. Do I understand them? Yes? Do I particularly care? Not as much as I should as often as I should. There were moments where I was straight-up 'Who Cares', and then there were moments I felt like their happiness was straight of 'D'Awwww.' But viewing it as a 20 year old guy in 2016, maybe I'm out of the age-range needed to fully appreciate this show.

One almost wants to shake Louise, and go 'Your partner is a HUMAN. A HUMAN. WITH INDEPENDENT THOUGHT!" And I can't believe I'm saying this, but Saito really needed a catchphase, something along lines of 'CONTEXT! PLEASE!' everytime something happened that he didn't understand (Which is quite often.)

Saito also couldn't figure out that biting-the-hand humor with Louise, someone's who short on humor, is not exactly a good idea to get into her good graces.

SPOILER FOR THE LAST EPISODE: When Saito gets an old WWII fighter plane, and it looks like he's going to leave, at one point, Louise manages to jump into the cockpit with him. I would have loved for the season to end with them actually getting through the solar eclipse and ending up on Earth. Hey, we spent the first season with Saito being a fish-out-of-water. Now, let's make Louise hold serve.