Review: Hyouka

One look at Hyouka, you’d think it’s just another slice of life genre about high school kids. Little did I know it’s a mystery-themed adaptation of a 2001 novel of the same name. Even the title of the series has a mystery behind it.

Original Author: Honobu Yonezawa

Studio: Kyoto Animation

Well, but guess what, it’s not your average mystery. Hyouka is about the members of the culture club solving unimportant mysteries, instead of the usual murder cases like you see in CSI. And you’ll be surprised to see how mature the characters are in spite of their age, cos you don’t see teens not acting like children fighting over a toy everyday.

How it all began, is when the main guy Oreki Hotarou meets Chitanda Eru (typical boy meets girl scene yay!) in his club room, and they start figuring how Chitanda was locked inside. So Chitanda got all fascinated by Oreki’s deduction skills, so she keeps forcing him to solve petty mysteries. Since she gets totally turned on by curious happenings, the cases needed to be solved in order for her to reach orgasm. So she went on ahead to ask Oreki’s help to solve her uncle’s mystery related to the school and the club like a selfish little bitch.

The mystery of her uncle was a success, but the detective play didn’t stop there, to Oreki’s displeasure. Cos Chitanda would unknowingly force him to SOLVE anything she finds curious by putting her face really close to his, activate her sparkly eyes and would look like it’s the end of the world if he refuses. Good thing Oreki is a nice guy so that little bitch would always get what she fukken wanted. Of course, she gets away with it because she's cute and innocent.

The art and animation is goddamn excellent that's for sure. They sure overdid the sparkling eyes

I appreciate that Hyouka maintains the fact that it's all about solving (not-so-important-and-unnecessary) mysteries in the rest of the episodes. I’m sure it got us all KININARIMASU. But the best case among the rest is the case of the Hyouka Anthology. Nothing can beat that. The next best case is the one about filming a detective story (because there's Irisu-senpai!)

I do acknowledge that without Chitanda, the story wouldn’t advance. Without her Oreki wouldn’t show his detective skills to the world and make the story awesomely unique. But there’s a lot of listening version of tl;dr, you know, like Death Note. Since you gotta explain the logic behind what happened. Sometimes it feels like the girls in the team is for mere decoration, as not only Oreki but Fukube is a very very GREAT character. I’m more than impressed by him (at how he envies Oreki but isn’t angry about it, his opinion on ‘obsession’) although he's just self-proclaimed biological 'database'. Mayaka on the other hand is an adorable character, but it feels like she's just a mascot girl who exists to fill in the blank. Minus the tsundere trait, I notice that are actually a lot of real life girls who has Mayaka’s dilemma.

Chitanda and Oreki appears to be canon, but due to fetish reasons I ship Oreki with Irisu. But seriously, if Oreki does go out with Chitanda later I can only hope that by the time he enters college, he’d dump her and get a new girlfriend who respects his energy conserving habits.

which is why I feel like punching the air in triumph when I see her disappointed face

Even so it’s one of the best animes of 2012 – not exactly my favourite but it’s better than most. I recommend this, but you gotta endure the long dialogs.

Review: GOSICK (Anime)

This is another 2011 anime that I forgot to review. And I liked it a lot.

Based on a light novel, GOSICK is about a tsundere loli detective with her unintentional assassistant who came from Japan. The year is 1924 and set in European country called Saubure. In spite of it being a fictional country, the reasoning behind the mystery solving session is not too farfetched. And at least they don't disturb too much historical facts for being a fictitious country. I have never seen or read any mystery-themed anime/manga (I don't Conan), but I've seen an episode of CLAMP School Detective but the mystery of that particular episode is not mysterious at all. I had to restrain from laughing at the detectives wondering about what happened derp-ishly. However, what makes GOSICK an interesting mystery, is not because it's another typical Sherlock Holmes mystery (not that I dislike) him, but most of the time Victorique deals with revealing the truth about urban legends. Yeah she can even deduce how magic trick works. So yeah it's not an actual detective story but more like doing some mythbusting the classical way.

Apparently, in an anime world, regardless of where you are as long as you look weird and foreign you're often the topic of urban legend gossip. Like the classmate's are like "omg he's a death god" just because his has black hair and is Asian but lulz Kazuya Kujou doesn't even look Japanese for heaven's sake. But then it's typical of anime artists to make Japanese having big eyes and colorful hair. And as a desperation move the author just had to use that popular stereotype probably to attract moetards. But surprisingly I like this loli tsundere, maybe it's because she's smarter than most tsunderes out there. Then there's also the cockblocker character whom I think would be good friends with the anti-social detective but turns out she's just there to be a busybody. I am a little disappointed at the relationship between characters part, especially when it comes toVictorique Du Blois who only wanted to open up to just one person.

he does not look Japanese

While I like all the cases they involved themselves in, the only thing I am disturbed with is the fact that the 'grey wolves' clan has some kind of superpowers thing. Here I thought it would be another urban legend thing to unravel, but turns out the bad guys were obsessed with the idea until the end. Now I am not sure what the 'superpower' really is (was it to bring fortune?), but it seem to indicate having a genius mind. But lol is that even an inheritence thing? The bad guy could just take any genius to help him take over the world or something instead of making a woman suffer thanks to a prophecy he believed in. good thing that's the only shit stuff about GOSICK and you can only see it at the last few episodes and suddenly the ending looks like the writers forgot the show is about mystery. Or maybe it wasn't in the first place. I pretty much enjoyed the mysteries rather than the actual plot... It's probably just me because the real story seems out of place with the whole thing we see.

The romance here, between the main characters is naive and pretty common, high school crush and one love triangle thing. What you see in the promo poster is what the canon pair is, so there's no suspense there. However, when it comes to the adults they have a rather mature and unorthodox take on it. Personally I love how they write the adults compared to the little kids.

and i love his hair

While I like the ED, the OP sounds too modern poppish it looks out of place for the gothic setting.

If you're a moetard do pick up this show, and even if you're not a tsundere loli fan do try this out and watch it for the urban legend mythbusting. Eventually you'd find Victorique to be charming too.

Review: UN-GO

There’s always something odd when it comes to mystery + supernatural, because this is where you can no longer use your logical thinking, or guess who the culprit is ahead from the detective.

I’m not a big fan of mysery, I don’t read/watch Kindaichi nor Conan, but I did enjoy Gosick. But I was turned off by Kamisama Memochou. As for UN-GO, I had a soft spot for Inga, regardless of what form s/he is in. And the detective is a guy so OK. He’s known as the “Defeated Detective” apparently, cos there’s the other old man who seems to have deduction skills that he only used to cover up higher ups mess. Plus, the main girl here isn’t that annoying. And I had nothing else to watch, the rest are a bunch of potentially annoying moeshits.

As far as I can remember, the mysteries consists of futuristic pop culture reference (idols, films, androids), I think this is the part which makes it interesting. Though I can say that Shinjuurou is cheating a bit by using Inga’s truth extraction powers, but he still did a great job. Cos Inga is basically clearing up his suspicions and making the suspect confess to people, without having Shinjuurou to dig deeper. Anyway, aside from Inga (whos always hungry for the truth) there's the artificial intelligence robot thingy who hacks databases - and we can actually watch her/his/it lurking through the interwebs.

Towards the end, the story becomes, as I dreaded, even more supernatural. For there was another creature that creatues illusions. This is where viewers can no longer relate to the mystery or detective, because personally I had no idea how the illusion is gonna be lifted in a MYSTERY themed. It was still nice to watch, but that supernatural power was annoying.

Yes this is another short review because I….watched this a year ago.