Anime is all about equal opportunity. Girls get bad harem series marketed towards them too!
I probably should've listened to my gut feeling and taken a pass on this because it never got any better. The premise is barely explained, the animation is horrendous, and the characters get little to no development. I honestly don't know how I got through thirteen episodes; I hear that the "interesting" part is in the second half, but now that the show has decided to go split-cour and continue in fall, I'm jumping ship here.
Honestly, it wouldn't have taken a lot for me to give this show a free pass since I wasn't expecting much in the first place. To begin with, it was an adaptation by the nearly universally-reviled Studio Deen. Not everything Deen makes is bad, but Hiiro no Kakera is an unfortunate example of how bad the studio can get. Off-model animation is frequent to the point where I didn't even recognize the characters in some scenes, eyes droop down faces like they're made of melting wax, and there are cost-saving animation techniques that make certain movements just look weird. Clearly Deen was using its budget on its other show this season.
However, bad animation isn't enough to break a show. I've enjoyed shows with horrible animation that had interesting characters and plotline to balance it out. Hiiro no Kakera has a somewhat interesting (if unoriginal) premise and the possibility of good characters... But it doesn't do anything with them. Nothing is explained and everything falls into their neatly organized stereotypes. The characters (and by extension, the audience) are told what they are and what they have to do to "save the world"... But there's never any real feeling that something big is at stake. The show tries to play it off as suspense, but there's a difference between that and withholding the information that is needed for the premise to work.
The characters also suffer as a result. There's a scene pretty early on where the harem refuses to define themselves as anything other than bodyguards, and for the most part that remains the case. Later we're told that they're "monsters who will be cast out from society," but again we get no explanation or feeling for what that means. A few manage to break out of that mold a bit, but from there the character interactions feel stale; it feels more like the show is checking off a list of events to replicate from the game rather than make it feel like an organic relationship. One character in particular really gets the worst deal when it comes to his character. He's defined as the guy who can sleep anywhere. That's it. Even the "bonus" harem member who only appeared a handful of times felt more well-rounded than him.
While it's possible that the second half will address all of these problems, the first half did nothing to convince me to keep watching it. It felt like yet another cheap phone-in adaptation of a franchise that's popular in the otome world. There were only two things I consistently liked about this show. The first is the background and landscape shots, which were amazingly pretty at points. Too bad they didn't give the same attention to making the character designs consistent. The second are the fanservice scenes at the end of every episode, which were far better than the entire show and something that I'd like to see otome adaptation use from here on out. But neither are nearly enough to save the show. I'm sure that Hiiro no Kakera has it's audience, but it has too many problems for me to see it through the end.
Images from Crunchyroll.com.
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