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Can an anime be judged mostly by it's ending? This was such a damn good psychological anime. Likeable characters and realistic drama mixed with supernatural fantasy. I was absolutely fully invested in rooting for the characters. And then the last few episodes happened. To say they dropped the ball would be an understatement. I'm only glad that 2 out of the 4 main characters had a satisfying conclusion to their arcs before the end.

Episode 11, episode 12, and the special (essentially episode 13) were a trainwreck of introducing plot points and not using them, not resolving previous plot points, and creating three of the most ... flat and low-payoff twist endings I've ever seen. And then they ended on a semi cliffhanger that will probably never be resolved, because this probably won't ever get a season 2.

If you were to be generous, you might say that this anime is more about the journey than the resolution. And if it hadn't tried to overcomplicate things at the end, I would probably have rated this as a 10/10. If this were by some miracle to be renewed for a season 2 I would consider updating my rating. Episodes 1 - 10 were excellent, with the exception of Episode 8 which is entirely skippable as it's a straight recap episode.

My rating of 7 isn't meant to convince you not to read this, this is pretty good. It's not especially long, and it's a pretty standard slice-of-life romance. There are a few curveballs thrown in, but otherwise it's pretty generic. Good generic though.

My issue with this comes from my feeling that several of the main characters seem undeveloped as the story progresses. Kanon herself gets the vast majority of the focus, and fair enough she is the main character, but I'd have liked to have seen more development of the rest of the cast. A slice-of-life lives and dies on the quality of it's main ... characters, and while the other main characters aren't quite stiff caricatures like they could be, they're just a *little* underwhelming.

Still, this is a recommendation from me though, this is a fairly short and contrary to the title sweet story. Worth a read.