Hyouka is your typical slice-of-life anime that deals with a group of high school students living everyday with their school club surrounding their little, personal stories. Over 22 episodes, the main protagonist (Oreki) is a laid-back, bored, and unmotivated teenager who's been trying his hardest to "conserve energy" by doing the minimum in every aspect of his life. That includes facial expressions, too. He's got his happy-go-luck friend, a cute and naive classmate who is ideally the main love interest of the story, and her friend, too. Together, they solve mysteries that has been happening around the school.
Only, each episode (or most of them) that deals with a certain issue taking place on said episode is done really badly. The mysteries are so boring, I don't think anyone actually cared about them being solved. If you expected suspense of sorts or being somewhat intrigued, then parish the thought -- you won't find any of that here. Oreki is always the one to come up with the brightest solution to them and being the leader of the group whilst still being really uninterested in... well, any of it.
Yeah, I get it's slice-of-life, but there is practically nothing interesting about this anime whatsoever. The mysteries are boring and drag on and on, characters are likeable but really unrelateable, and even for the shippers of the main show -- neither Oreki or his love interest show any signs to each other whatsoever. If you thought you'd get anything in the ending, scratch that; anyone spoiling you what is happening in the last episode won't actually be spoiling anything, because /nothing/ happens there. Oops.
Hyouka is beautifully crafted, drawn and animated, with very nice character designs, theme songs and what not -- but otherwise, the show is lacking, and lacking big. I really wanted to love this anime, but the only reason I finished it was so that I wouldn't have to change its status to "dropped" on MAL.
