Simple and good plot I'd say, there's plenty of potential for character development and stuff, just overall pretty good I'd say. And the first episode reflects exactly what I would want from an anime like that. It reminds you of Nana, if you're not familiar with that, go watch it. It starts off as this adult drama basically with Sawamura thrown into the adult world with only his Shamisen, we see abusive boyfriends, failed actresses needing to make tough choices and he's in the middle of it all.
Then suddenly, this completely changes. When you think of obscure Japanese instrument anime you could probably predict that some kind of school club is involved and that everyone is going for these prefectural/national competitions to win before the senpais leave or something, and there's this one amazing player or this player with a tragic backstory that the plot centres around. If you like that kind of anime, good for you, if you don't, you might think: Oh! This anime is different! Now here's that twist again: It's not!
In fact, the enitre anime completely changes in tone by the third episode. Suddenly we're at a high school club with a bunch of incompetent Shamisen players who all have their own reasons to play shamisen and need to learn to appreciate it etc. etc. etc. Even the opening song changes at this point. Instead of this intense shamisen rock song they change it to your average anime OP. AKA this anime has a problem in tone! Just like its main character who doesn't seem to be able to find his own tone.
SPOILERS
That kind of brings me to what happens in the final episode where Sawamura after having learned a lot from his friends but still having some anxiety in him about living up to his grandpa's great name plays his solo performance at the shamisen competition and switches styles halfway through the performance because he suddenly realises that he has his own sound. As you might know if you watched the show, he doesn't get a lot of points for that because he doesn't have a uniting "thread" throughout his performance. The jury does not judge kindly upon that and one of the characters explains that to Sawamura. I'm sure the irony of this does not go unnoticed by the sharp reader of this review, since it seems to reflect upon the entire anime. So what this anime taught me, I cannot grade this one very highly... There's just no uniting thread throughout this anime.
The music is good though if you're interested in that kind of thing.
