Now this sentence doesn't explain my score on the show and you'll see why in a moment.
It's a cute show, don't get me wrong. But the contents and delivery of said contents are difficult to swallow. The direction and pacing are all over the place. Sometimes its too slow and scenes/jokes drag on for far too long, and other times its too fast giving you hardly any time to take in the information. The story itself (or premise at least) is cute but it's nothing special. Honestly most of these slice of life with fantastical elements type show have some basic structure and predictable plot elements to them, with the delivery and execution of its contents differentiating them from one another. Like, Endro had a very similar premise (with a switch in perspective), but that show at least felt good to watch and was pleasant to sit through. Machikado on the other hand felt downright claustrophobic at times. The characters are fine, but I never really liked Shamiko. Her being the tsukkomi to most situations just boil down to her explaining what just happened to the audience. A very lousy way of setting up jokes. I quite liked Mikan breaking up the monotony but she appeared far too late into the series by which I was already exhausted. Similar shows would typically incorporate characters like these somewhere in the middle as that's usually the point where they would exhaust the standard jokes and setups with the existing cast. In either case, the narrator is surprisingly my favourite character of the bunch. His optimistic "Ganbare Shamiko!" never fails to make me smile and out of all the cast, he is the only one to receive any payoff by the end of the show. The music was surprisingly nice, although maybe I tend to notice it more since I usually zone out watching the show and start paying attention to the background elements.
I deliberately didn't include any paragraph spacing just now to demonstrate how it felt watching the show.
4/10
Ganbare Shamiko! May you receive better adaptations in the future.
