When a show out of the norm appears, it might get sometimes praised for the sole reason that it's different.
But is uniqueness alone truly enough to make it great?
Here we have an anime with many promising and interesting ideas, Shinsekai yori. It has been given credit many times for it's atmosphere and uniqueness, which is exactly the reason why I decided to pick this anime up.
You know what? It left quite sour taste in my mouth.
True, the world in SSY is well thought. The concept of Ogres, Monster Rats, Karmic Demons and the bloody history etc. was well done. But the thing is, SSY fails to execute those ideas properly. The series doesn't really know what it wants to be, and the pacing was quite bad sometimes. In the end, it ended up looking messy, rushed and telling us more content than actually showing it in the action.
I think the show should've utilized it's horror or psychological elements more instead of the some character centered drama. And speaking of characters, that's another really weak point of the series. Shun, Maria and Mamoru were sadly created only to be plot devices. Saki and Satoru were really 'blah', not being exactly hateable but not loveable or memorable either. They just... were there.
Time skips were super annoying and unnecessary. And episode 8.. was poorly done. We all saw before the time skip that Shun and Saki shared mutual attraction, but then they both went gay out of blue. And later Shun comments about 'always loving Saki.' Um, what the heck were you doing with Satoru then?
The OST.. It's nice, but becomes overused quickly due to lack of variety. Especially that choir theme, which I originally really liked in the beginning.
Animation has trouble staying consistent. Animation at it's best looks stunning, especially the nature (and episode 10!), but on it's bad moments (like episode 5) it looks really bad. I personally think the character designs are neat, but I understand why some people might not like them. They might be a tad too 'shoujo-ish' for some.
Did I think it was a horrible series? No. Under different circumstances, it could've been easily one of my favorite animes. I'm just saying, that it is highly flawed and I don't think that it deserves for most part the praise it gets.
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