That last episode was beautiful. It has to be one of the best I’ve seen in a long time. It even brought me to tears. The show took all of the relationships that the story had painstakingly crafted and just let them be themselves.
The show is still plagued by the major shortcomings of the manga, primarily how underdeveloped Shidehiko Hishigata is. This was the reason why I didn’t like the manga’s ending, and the anime is pretty much a carbon copy, so my thoughts persist. Near the end, he goes from being such a multifaceted character built up from episode 1 to one of those generic I want to destroy the world kinda antagonists in only two or three episodes.
What’s great about Summertime Rendering is that’s about the only terrible thing I can say about it. The opening and ending themes were sleeper hits. I didn’t expect them to be as good as they were, especially the second opening. The first one felt more like it should have been the ending song, but whatever.
As I expected, I loved the character designs. The animation style was great, although I did dislike the rare glossy look it had. But it was few and far between to affect my experience by any margin. The speciality of Summertime’s characters is that you can put them inside any dress, and you’ll still be able to identify them, even if they’re only a blip on your screen. For such a long story, it only has a few characters at the core of the story, and they are developed to the fullest. This is why it’s so weird to see our primary antagonist, Shidehiko, turned into a flat, black-and-white villain. It’s weird.
The story didn’t have the punch I expected, mainly because I already knew what was going to happen. This is literally the first show I finished where I had already finished reading the manga. So obviously, I knew what would happen. Even though it’s been, what, two years since I’ve read this, it never really left my mind. It’s not like I minded, hell, this deserved to be in there.