Fuuka tells the story of Yuu Haruna, a guy who seemingly does nothing but post about his day on Twitter meeting the titular character: a crazy, strange girl who cares about nothing more than music. The two put aside their inital differences to form a band, following in the footsteps of a band they idolize. Of course, there's also a love triangle between the two and Yuu's childhood friend: an idol named Koyuki. The show attempts to juggle both plots simultaneously, but it gets pretty clumsy at times and certain things seem to come out of nowhere. Additionally, it really fails to bring much originality to the premise; this is hardly the first anime to deal with the creation of a band or include a love triangle, so there won't be a whole lot of surprises to anyone watching. The only ones who may be surprised are manga readers, as certain events are changed significantly to give this an anime original ending.
There's nothing special about Fuuka's art and animation. It works fairly well most of the time, but character design is a bit unoriginal. I don't have much to say about this aspect of the show, just that it's one of the anime's stronger points.
As an anime about music, one would hope that Fuuka does a good job when it comes to sound. It definitely succeeds, with some very solid and catchy songs performed by the band, including the excellent OP Climber's High! However, said OP gets played a bit too much, considering it's the only song the band practices and plays initially, which gets a little annoying. The character voices are fairly decent, and although I don't really care for Fuuka's speaking voice, her excellent singing more than makes up for it. I'd say that sound is definitely the strongest point of Fuuka, but honestly that's not too difficult an achievement.
Fuuka has pretty weak, and in some cases, utterly unlikeable characters. When there's a love triangle, and a girl who's not even involved in it is a preferable option to the two who are, there's something wrong with your characters. Obviously, this is just my opinion, but Fuuka comes off as incredibly annoying for a majority of the anime, and Koyuki honestly seems utterly irrelevant, her only purpose seems to be to create conflict between band members and in general. The rest of the characters aren't much better, but even the tolerable ones suffer from a lack of development. It honestly seems like Yuu, Fuuka, and Koyuki are the only ones who get any meaningful character development, and that's a shame considering how bland I find them.
The only time I really cared about what was happening and looked forward to the next episode was when I read manga spoilers. Before reading the spoilers and after it became clear they were going anime original, it was really a chore to watch this week after week. The band storyline is admittedly somewhat decent, but the romances are weak and this is one of the worst love triangles I can recall, making for quite a painful watch. It's not even worth watching if you're an ecchi fan, since there's barely anything of note. Fuuka gets a couple panty shots, there's a bath scene or two, and there's one scene where Yuu's three sisters are inexplicably all in their underwear. It seems like a pathetic attempt to pander to viewers, but it really doesn't do anything more than that.
Fuuka is an exercise in medocrity, and is a good example of how to write an uninteresting romance. I won't deny that there are aspects of it that people can and will enjoy, but personally, I wouldn't recommend this anime to anyone unless they desperately want to watch music related anime. Even then, there's a good half dozen I'd recommend first. This isn't the worst thing I've seen, but it's certainly no masterpiece.
