Unfortunately, this was an extremely shallow series in comparison.
I'm sure we're all wondering what those insect antennas are doing on almost every character's hair in this series. It must have surpassed 'Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto' as series with dumbest ahoge in history. But other than that, the characters are very visually attractive, and hands and feet are drawn with more detail and better proportion than most anime series around.
I must commend the art in this series, not because of its detail or style, but because of its revolutionary distribution of animation budget. A typical show goes like this: 1:00 flashback, 1:30 OP, 17:30 content, 1:30 ED1, 2:00 side story, 1:30ED2 for 25-minute ad-free air time. The side story has super-simplistic backgrounds with chibi-form characters, which is a lot easier to draw and saves money/time. What this and having two EDs per episode has allowed, is only 17:30 of actual content per show instead of standard 22:00. The shorter actual content in combined with heavy recycling of backgrounds has enabled very beautiful character appearance and animation despite the apparent small budget.
This is damaging to the art consistency and content, but fortunately this series didn't have much material to begin with, and leaves much better impression than average quality overall.
Voice acting was pretty good, everyone sounded like they should.
BGM was also pretty good with nostalgic, gentle pieces that complimented the visuals in creating a peaceful countryside atmosphere.
The theme songs were extremely weak, I would've expected more from Eufonius, but the song sounded tiring as Riya was trying and failing to hit the high keys. Two EDs were very forgettable.
The opening act was the worst episode 1 I've ever seen. It served as an introduction to the main couple's relationship and other girls he would eventually tap, but it presented itself as a shallow harem right off the bat. All the girls basically fall in love at first sight without apparent reasons. It's also difficult to imagine countryside girls would dig a bishounen type.
Other girls back off after that though, and the main character goes after them one by one. The story in this series has a eroge-like save function where the protagonist chooses different paths and play out what would've happened had he chosen differently. It's kind of interesting, but unfortunately, the whole concept tumbled when heroines acted completely different in each arc. For example, Sora accepts Haruka and Nao's relationship in one arc, but in the following one, she becomes so mentally unstable that the previous arc's ending could've never happened.
It was also difficult to see why the protagonist would go after each girl. In 'Amagami SS', they at least attempt to explain this by who the protagonist walks into immediately after a life-altering event. Here, the main character seemed to just go after them because he had to (the scriptwriter forced him to).
The characters are of course the typical harem archetypes, and there's nothing wrong with that, but they never grew out of their cardboard cutout existence. Every girl would suddenly share a devastating past trauma to the main character, and then make out with him after he somehow solve their problems. Character development here just seemed to be manufactured to get us to sympathize with heroines, and feels like we're just supposed to go along with it. This is a blatant sign of poor story writing, because such issues should be uncovered natural enough or the story should be so engaging that we won't even notice such details if done right.
The chemistry between the main couple were seen in other heroine's arcs, and it's somewhat understandable that they would eventually commit incestuous act given their mutual feelings and couple of awkward events between the two. However, issues such as morality and love surrounding incest was never explored in this series, and in the end, it just seemed like lust, and they even make up a half-assed excuse that this is okay because they have been apart for so long that they see each other as strangers rather than siblings. This defeats the whole point of this series being incest themed, and whatever point they made after that seemed to be superfluous.
'Yosuga no Sora', unlike 'Amagami SS', presented itself as a thought-provoking and controversial incest themed series with foreshadowing of the main couple's relationship with all the "restarts". But in the end, it failed to fulfill its own promise, and turned into yet another shallow romance anime more suited for hentai. If you're looking for a deep incest drama, you won't find it here. Less than average series, less than hentai.
