Conclusion: Natsuiro Kiseki

Thank you for not following the same path of boring-ass "girls in slice-of-life series" routine that Tamayura started.

Just...

Thank you.

(Also, Sunrise did this original. Be joyous.)

Not sure if iDOLM@STER spinoff...

Or iDOLM@STER side-story

So what happens when you put four girls/friends-for-life together to do fun stuff everyday? A shitty series.

Or so I thought...

Talking about production values...again, Sunrise-smooth as usual, I really do like how they sort of took off the glossy shine that we saw in something like Horizon and created a more pastel-color, rich palette. That sort of shiny, plastic-like graphics has no place in a 4-girl slice-of-life series. I also really like how they relly focused on getting the dancing right. If this was iDOLM@STER, that would be standard, but since it isn't, props.

The OST is pretty good too; the OP especially (Non stop road by Sphere) is a definite contender to get onto  my music player. A soundtrack sung by a legitimate sponsored band is pretty good after all.

I feel like this is the reaction I get from my friends when I do the same thing.

The plot of Natsuiro Kiseki is interesting. OH WAIT - I know exactly what this reminds me of - it reminds me of Edith Nesbit's Five Chidren and It! It follows nearly the same idea: siblings (in this case, friends-for-life) have something (a rock or Psammead) that grants them a big wish every once in a while. However, the wish almost always goes wrong - but don't worry! Stupid wishes build character! And thus the set of siblings/friends grow closer and slightly more cautious over time. 

In fact, the only difference between Natsuiro and a novel like Five Children and It is the fact that the rock seems to have a random recharge period and that the girls are friends, not siblings - a seeming inevitability in this "realistic slice-of-life" based modern era of anime, but one that puts an interesting twist on all this. What is it? Well you see, friends can't always be together, unlike siblings. Indeed, that is actually the major focus of this series - how things change; how best friends won't necessarily be able to see each other whenever they want, forever and ever; how friends work together and sleep together and play together under this time pressure; and how as friends, they accept this happening and evolve. It faces the problem of someone "leaving permanently" from the group a bit more head-on than a lot of other series who just toss this whole "oh I have to go in X amount of time" factor into the mix in order to put a bit more tension into whatever objective needs to be reached. Because it explores that pretty well, I think this series is surprisingly one of the better ones of the season.

Wow, that wasn't confusing at all

The pacing and the episodic nature of the series is very nicely thought out (and it had better be, as an anime original...) they manage to include in a lot of mini-stories, but the two-episode conclusion at the end was very nicely done, ties up all the loose ends, opens up a little bit of what could happen in the future with their dreams of becoming idols, and overall is a very nice use of that little Endless Eight trick to, well, make it not seem like Endless Eight. The banter is quite nice, and the four radically different personalities actually work out very nicely even when they are all together (instead of in, say, K-On!, where Asuza, Yui, and Mio tend to take center stage). My favorite character was Yuka, the green-tailed hyper girly, but the other girls had personalities that didn't make them completely 2D either.

Overall, I think this is a nice series that does more than just look pretty, have four girls and present a nice OP. It discusses the distancing of friends at significant length and manages to keep the interest up by having the girls overreact and run around town like chickens with their heads cut off. Give this a whirl - the modern rendition of Nesbit's beloved classic may also appeal to you.

Recommendation: Solid series. Try it out.

QQ need moar exercise