Story - The entire premise of Hand Shakers is flawed and should've been changed during pre-production. The premise could've had changes made to allow a less awkward development and scenario between all of the characters. It forces certain characters to do illogical acts to try and keep the series' drama and motives to battle each other. The original creator, rather than making changes to the premise, decided to try and work around it, which resulted in the series digging a hole further and further.
The story is capped and limited by the amount of time spent on completely unnecessary scenes, such as the repeated gag of one of the characters being short. There are also plenty of other mundane scenes which does not help to grow any characters or plot developments what-so-ever.
Art - The art in this series has a lack of colour coordination, that any professional colourist should be capable of. Some scenes have very vibrant colours, and has a sleek look with many shiny surfaces and light reflection. In other scenes, colours will suddenly go to a much more bland look that reminds me of 1970s decor.
Almost every background art is rendered in CGI, which a few hand-painting things like leaves and grass over the shot. But most of the time, uses a single tree image and does a copy, paste to several in a row, making scenes look completely unnatural and repetitive. Cameras will be placed at very odd angles and do unnecessary movements that will make you nauseous.
The CGI in general, is very patchy and made up of poorly textured models which makes the backgrounds look more akin to films outside of anime, known as Ratatoing and The Little Panda Fighter.
Though thankfully, most of the character designs actually look great, and are coloured very nicely. The character animations can rarely be jerky, but for the most part keeps consistent quality.
Sound - The music is very nice, and even though it doesn't have the epic sounds of most action series, it really works well with the pacing and mood of the series.
The sound effects can sound a little bit like stock audio files on royalty free sites, but doesn't really impact the experience of the anime after you spend most of your cognitive thinking power trying to follow characters through the wacky pans and flips and rotations.
The voice actors' performance can sometimes sound forced, although it might sound more cringe due to the bad scripting.
Character - You wont know any more about a character that you will have seeing them for their initial 3 minutes on screen. It will keep on re-iterating their personality type and complex for the rest of the entire series (so far).
The two main characters seems to be the least fleshed out, as each arc in this series always focuses on their enemies, leaving very little time to build the relationship between Tazuna and Koyori. Koyori being potentially the most interesting if we could ever get a look into her mind.
Enjoyment - The series has at least kept me interested enough not to drop it, but as I watch each episode, my patience decreases slightly. Being a 3D modeller, I would sometimes pause on scenes have a little giggle to myself over the poor CGI being presented.
What a shame.
