Interest Stacks

One of my favourite anime of all time, but even I have to admit the pacing is hard to swallow for someone who's not a fan of Nasu's work and/or into novels, the movies mainly kept the events of the novel but even by trimming some edges, the fact the first 4 movies are told in a non-linear manner can make it hard to feel invested as it takes a while until the main cast is properly introduced, this is only an issue for the first 4 movies (none of which are longer than an hour).

It's not unusual for Light Novel adaptation to be mainly dialogue and have slower pacing, 86 does make it for it by having great action sequences and a rather unique take on mecha. Also one of the few anime where "it gets better with time" basically means part 2.

This is what propelled me into making this list, Gosick has serious issues not only with pacing but also narrative, character writing and a lot of the time it doesn't know what it wants to be in the first place, I could write a whole review on these problems and I'd still give it a 7 or 8 because the plot nearing the end is so good. So strap yourself for the usual Bones slow-to-a-crawl speed.

Abstract, confusing, and avant-garde; Lain is a rather divisive anime with how it says a lot but very little of it feels coherent, it's only 13 episodes long but going through it feels like thrice as long because of how the anime sets the mood; it's not just the plot moving at a snail's pace but that you can hardly tell when the plot is moving let alone what IS the plot. I believe it is the picture-perfect example of "slow burner".

Unlike Lain, Ghost Hound offers a linear and concrete story that is understandable, but the pacing is even slower. Not much to say here, it's a slow burner but very well-written.

It is not easy to complain about the pacing of a battleshounen, most of them have horrible pacing and it comes with the turf, but for Soul Eater it gets better. The anime starts with a very easy-going school-ish plot then it starts to develop into arcs but the narrative is never quite that engrossing, the whole reason to watch Soul Eater after all is for the characters being charismatic and the fights being well-made, it is the meaning of style over substance, but for an anime with 51 episodes it still feels longer than that purely due to the number of needless info-dumps.

It's a great battle-shounen whose narrative is slower than most battle-shounens, but the battles themselves are ever-present and the most interesting part of it, it's rarely a "I'll punch him harder with the power of friendship" situation and it gives the idea that these characters are truly skillful in combat. So in short, don't watch it for the plot.

Everybody loves part 3 but it drags for so long it requires the patience of a monk to get through it in less than a week's worth of sessions, it's essentially a single arc stretched into 24 episodes. JoJo in general suffers a lot with pacing but part 3 is by far the worst of it.

Saying Evangelion has a pacing issue is weird because at the same time it doesn't feel like it, the narrative is a mess and it makes sense once you look at how the production went (with storyboards sometimes getting animated last minute before the episode was supposed to release and such, blame Anno). I'm not saying the issue are scenes where nothing happens for up to a minute but rather that it's a show that's not afraid to force you to sit down for long stretches of time to take in the scene, and while that cross the line between being good and insisting upon itself, the result can be rather enjoyable if you're into it, then again everyone watched Eva regardless since it's such a classic.

Last piece of the rebuild series, unlike the original anime, 3.0+1.0 (the fourth remake movie) is just a long movie which goes out of it's way to destroy what Evangelion was and rebuild it as something else, it's takes the avant garde up a notch and as such it's easy to hate the generic mecha shit it offers by the ending, but what makes it really hard to get through is the pacing at the start which is deliberately slow and does nothing to move forward the narrative, not that it's bad and I doubt you'd care if you've watched this far but it's important to keep in mind that this movie can easily feel thrice as long if you're not engrossed in it.

This anime could be divided into 3 acts; the first act in which the world and it's characters are introduced but they never show too much and it all feels disjointed, the second act where info-dump and side-shows keep happening and very little of it is relevant to the overall plot (until /that one/ one episode where literally everything is shoved in your face), then the third act where the characters solve everything in a slow and complex manner.

While Ergo Proxy is not bad it's definitely an acquired taste, the middle portion definitely drags for no real reason other than being pedantic and all philosophical.

Re:Creators is quick to get the ball rolling but then stops to give long-winded infodumps that are rarely interesting. It suffers from that LN adaptation issue where the pacing is consistently jumping all over though it is handled well enough that the aforementioned infodumps aren't that bad at first, then again if you cut all of those out this anime would go from 22 episodes to 12.

What makes the pacing *atrocious* is how quick it is at the start, it constantly goes from 0 to 100 in the blink of an eye before slowly backing down to 0 again, but then by the half of the show it completely slows down and goes entire episodes showing nothing but exposition with few interesting conversations. In short, it's a great action anime with an interesting premise that tries way too hard to make you take it seriously by shoving in hours' worth of exposition that could just as well have been saying "it's magic lmao".

The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi is a classic but as it's common with classics it has been surpassed by it's peers, though a classic it remains. While most people know of the infamous Endless Eight arc where the same episode repeats eight times and (to be exact the 2nd to 7th episode are the same, while the first and last are unique, so you only need to watch 3 episodes).

Suzumiya Haruhi is an anime that generally has a horrible pacing and I wouldn't blame you if you wished to skip a few during rewatches, but by no means is it a bad anime, even when it shows it's age it also shows quality that was high for it's time and a lot of soul that was put into it, some of it's more memorable parts are almost larger-than-life compared to the menial parts, and in a way the slow pacing feels like it's part of the experience of a SoL so the memorable bits feel even better.

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