Tenchou's review- Gosick 1-3

Urusai! Urusai! Urusai!

This is the other show I planned to review per episode- Gosick, the mystery anime by the infamous Bones studio based on a light novel by Kazuki Sakuraba. The story is set in a fictional Euro country shortly after WWI, Sauville, where the MC, Kujo, and the loli-Sherlock Holmes, Victorique, goes around solving mysteries.

As always, Bones did an amazing job with the first three episodes, enough to make me want to review this anime every episode despite being a story-driven anime. The art is done so well that I'm absolutely in love with the animation- so fluid, so detailed and so consistent. The animation made up for the story, which is somewhat lacking despite being a mystery anime. The twists are too obvious and lack originality and the backstory for Victorique was revealed too early and also lacks the impact due to the cliche. It's unfortunate since it takes away from the excellent character design, art and animation, but this anime can still be salvage with better stories and twists later on, and maybe even heavy character development. At this very moment, I would file this under 'potentially good', and hopefully it'll develop into something worth recommending to other people.

I think I mentioned in this post before, I suspect the anime industry is trying to turn me into a lolicon. They failed with each attempt (Asu-nyan, Kirino) but they keep trying harder and harder. This time they pulled out a smart, lovable loli-Sherlock Holmes to appeal to my intelligent side, so not cool. Victorique is smart, refined, but has her childish moments like the luggage and tsundere stuff, coupled with her moments when she admired the sceneries, I want a daughter like this! (~_~) ARG damn you anime industry, I SHALL NOT FALL!

Now, back to the story. The 'Hare prophecy' case was pretty dull, there were moments where the mystery was actually mysterious. Overall though, the story had too many clues and too many hints, the only saving grace was the atmosphere created by Bones that made it so much more appealing than it was. It was easy to see through the prophet's death, and it was equally easy to see through the ship plan, both 'mystery' had way too many obvious clues that should've been much more subtle and hidden. Unfortunately, such is the problem with a one-cour (12 episodes) anime, there isn't enough time to lay down the groundwork for a proper mystery and you could only rely heavily on the atmosphere. With that said though, the characters in the case was done well; if there was one thing I did not expect it was the maid and the Julie's relationship, so that was pretty nice to see, even though they were both murderers (justly so, but still murderers, c'est la vie). I also like Kujo as a character, bare-fist brawl with a guy with an huge axe, that's pretty gutsy, even though the rest of his character was rather wimpy. At any rate, next arc should be interesting with a cute transfer student, looking forward to it!.

Again, the above screencaps was taken from Random Curiosity, thank you again, the animated one was taken from Animesuki forums.