First Impressions: Chihayafuru

After a lot of delays, this one finally managed to crawl out of the woodwork. Without further ado, here's Chihayafuru!

If it doesn't involve hitpoints and trap cards, it will never ever be popular in America. Just saying.

NotMoe's hope for the fall, Chihayafuru creates an interesting background premise on the standard love-triangle shoujo series. Personally,  I find it a tad too dramatic and predictable, but I guess it's hard to skimp on that AND make a series based on a traditional card game exciting. Pity though.

The graphics are good enough - standard shoujo series flair. Nothing too shiny, just cute enough for people to like. The sounds are again nondescript - the OP tries to be unique but it just seems to fall under the bus because of it's lack of strength in both the vocals and the melody. I guess I should watch it a few more times but to be quite honest I don't think this will be a very good OST.

Going back to the plot, it just doesn't seem very moving/satisfactory just yet. This is a major reason as to why I dislike shoujo series - not because it doesn't move, but because it spends all its time setting up while doing nothing. I can stand a slow pace, but it has to go somewhere. A season's worth of flashbacks and "what-if"s into sudden "YAY NOW WE'RE DIFFERENT LET'S GO BE HAPPY TOGETHER"? Nu-uh. I'm turning that crap off.

Believe me when I say that this kid is whipped.

It's just that seeing the slow flashbacks just pain me. Flashbacks should never take up the majority of an episode like they do in this series. Couple that with the painfully obvious route and conclusion that they're showing so far and you have a series that's starting to get on my nerves. Hopefully it'll end up being exciting and the protagonists face the challenges together and come together in the love-triangle. But to me, this series is nothing more than a puzzle that I've already solved:

1) The kid that the others thought would never give up gives up

2) The cast comes to his house to convince him otherwise with the power of friendship

3) He comes back, then gets owned because he's rusty

4) Slow improvement

5) Love-triangle side-story that gets slowly more involved with the main story

6) Fall-out amongst the cast due to 5 and because of skill-plateau while playing the game

7) They find cool childhood trinkets and realize how retarded this series they are
8) They come back and meet with each other
9) They join one last final awesome tournament
10) The main hero (the girl) and the other genius guy OR the girl vs some Deep Blue robot Asian-skills person face off against each other.
11) With lots of groaning and willpower-invoking, the girl manages to win.
12) The main cast celebrates and goes out to a cafe. The girl promises that they will always be together.

I mean...was there another series that wasn't so obvious? If it was Saki it would be less predictable because of all the craziness and the girls, but a detective novel Chihayafuru ain't.

I think I'll leave this series to NotMoe. Watch it if you like shoujo, but I suggest you leave it alone if you want something that quickly piques your imagination.

EDIT: I lied. The characters are awful.

A man with a plan
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By the way, there seem to be some people on the internet who are trying to calm the masses down from running a bus over Kyoukai Senjou by saying stupid stuff like "Wait until Commie subs Kyoukai Senjou no Horizon, then you'll get everything!" or "Oh I get it, I'm just smarter than you lolololol"...

1) If you require some kind of extra foresight in a series to figure out all the background complexity (not vague themes, BACKGROUND INFORMATION), then you might as well write a mystery novel, not a 20-minute action-filled set of nonsense.

2) If you're not cluing the viewers into most of what the hell's going on in any given medium by the halfway or the quarter-way point, you're simply bad at making creative plots. Mystery is inherently DIFFERENT from mass confusion. I don't want to say stuff like "OH MY GOD I DON'T KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON". I want to say stuff like "Whoah, I wonder what's going to happen next?" There's a difference. Learn it.

3) If at ANY POINT I REQUIRE DIFFERENT QUALITIES OF TRANSLATIONS TO CLUE ME IN AS TO WHAT'S GOING ON, IT SHOULD BE A RED FLAG AS TO HOW BAD THE SERIES IS. I shouldn't require a "high-level" translation to understand generally what's going on. Problem is, I don't understand any of what's going on. Furthermore, no amount of translation will help me understand why everybody is going around with floating dropships killing everything with maid robots and saying stupid crap like "Judge" all the time! Jesus. Drop it newbies, because you don't know what you're saying.

WHAT IS GOING ON?!