I have mixed feelings about Kaguya-sama. Watching it then, I can’t say I enjoyed it emmencely. But when it comes to originality. This simply blew me away. From it’s very very enjoyable narrator to it’s varying cast of character. The anime is a cesspool of originality for me. It’s hard to find a comedy that doesn’t reuse old techniques to crack a joke or simply copy and paste some slapstick joke with a different context. This however, manages to remain unique from start to end. That by itself is worth a praise.
Something I love about Kaguya-sama is how perfectly it mashes serious tones with very very comedic tones. At times it’s seriously goofing around while in the next scene it’s questioning if their ego is displeasing to others. Especially the ending ep. The anime does a very good job at constantly shifting between two modes of progressing the plot seamlessly. On one hand using well thought out jokes and on the other doing serious character development through thoughtfullness.
Though I enjoyed it very much. I wasn’t able to attatch myself to the characters. It feels to me that the anime gave me every reason to make a connection with it’s cast but… I simply couldn’t. I still don’t really understand why exactly I feel this way. I believe the sky hight expectations I had coming into the show had a pretty big say in it. When you go into a show with atmospheric expectations. You tend to loose what the show is really about. This is very common in games. The hype the marketing department of a gaming publisher pushes out sometimes blows the actual proportions of the game into the stratosphere. This makes a huge about how you feel about the game within the first couple of hours of play time. Even if the game is good. You compare it to the expectations you have. If your expectations were higher than what you got from it, you’d feel dissapointed. Sometimes even blidniding you from the beauty of an experience right in front of you.
Even then, hype or expectations aren’t something that can be stopped nor banished. Best way to cope is to convince yourself to enjoy what it is you get. Not what it is you expect. If I had been successful at it, I’m sure I would’ve enjoyed the anime more than how much I did in the end.