Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

Title: Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya Genre: Comedy, Supernatural, Psychological Rating (season 1): 8/10 Rating (season 2): 5/10

Summary: On the first day of high school a beautiful girl named Haruhi Suzumiya introduces herself as having "no interest in ordinary humans". She asks for any aliens, time travelers, sliders or espers to join her. Watching her weird behaviour is Kyon who sits in front of Haruhi and is the only person who talks to her. When Kyon comments about Haruhi's joining every club in school and then quitting he unwittingly gives Haruhi an idea to start her own after school club. Thereafter Kyon and several others find themselves dragged, literally, into the Save our world by Overloading it with fun Suzumiya Haruhi's Brigade.

Review: You have probably noticed that I generally write a single review for a multiple season anime, but this one really does deserve to be split. The first season doesn’t deserved to be dragged down due to the not-so-lovely second season. Let’s start with the soundtrack and art style which were both pleasing to the eye and ears. Songs like “God Knows” and “Lost My Music” were actually sung by the voice actress Aya Hirano bringing a refreshing new sound to anime. The artist took into account the details of mouth movement and sweat drops during the concert scene in the first season. A lot of recent animes have been doing the same thing, but this one really stood out to me. The scenes that the artist actually took the time to sketch every little muscle motion brought out a great side to this anime. Moving onto the storyline of the first season I would give it a pretty good rating. The story was more about trying to find out the secrets of Haruhi Suzumiya and distinguishing the difference between reality and fiction. The first season ended on a pretty good note considering they knew a second season was coming along. The season left viewers with interest because it didn’t answer all the questions, but enough to satisfy. The first season also brought rich comedy with play on words, awkward moments, and cute scenes. The second season is when the anime really started to go down hill. Although the characters didn’t change much, and it still stuck on the comedy genre I got so bored with the anime I really contemplated dropping it all together. Many of you probably have heard of the Endless Eight. The endless eight will make you feel like the producers got very lazy, and probably stopped caring about the anime. Although I would like to give the director the benefit of the doubt and say that it is a unique art sense. The problem is that unique is not always a good thing. I would have tolerated the “Endless Three” maybe even four, thinking that it brought out a great sense of anime, but eight just killed me. After the Endless Eight the anime didn’t get much better. It felt like filler episodes with no hard storyline. It was fine at first, but the comedy remained the same which got tiresome after a while. The second season really didn’t live up to my expectations given from the first season.

Final statements: Short review, but I believe I got my point across. I suggest sticking with the first season and skipping the second completely. You may feel tempted to keep watching but trust me it isn’t worth it. Low priority watch.

Happy Valentines Day!