Reviews

An analogy: imagine you're listening to a singer perform a brand-new song that has four verses. Their voice is nothing special, but the first two verses and the chorus tell a deeply relatable, at times heartwarming and at times heartwrenching story... then on the third verse the singer stumbles for a bit and ends up having to repeat the second verse, and on the final verse the entire tune changes and is distorted until it's unrecognizable. How do you rate such a song? Was it good overall? Do its exceptional parts outweigh its stumbles and ultimate failure? Does it matter if the sheet music had a fifth unsung verse even worse than the performance you just saw?

KareKano was a promising series that suffered a late-term budget and directorial abortion midway through. The honest romance, strong characterization, realistic relationship struggles, and unique art style got abandoned halfway through and replaced with clip show recaps and a back half of episodes that never quite manage to find their footing after the interruption.

If you're feeling like an anime archaeologist and want to see a classic romance series that has the bones of a good story with a depth of emotions, characters who actually push themselves and each other forward, and a sometimes hypnotically calm and thoughtful pace, you could certainly use to flip through a few episodes of KareKano, but it never quite delivers on what it promises at the outset.

That being said, hungry for more, I pursued the manga, which concludes on some... deeply problematic notes with enough red flags to make the Beijing Olympics look tame. You've been warned.