Mar 24, 2016
A famous idiom is, "To kill two birds with one stone."
But with Haruchika, it's more like "To miss two birds with 12 stones."
Haruchika revolves around two main characters (in case you haven't guessed from the title, their names are nonetheless Haruta and Chika), that are part of the Brass Band Club. Not only are Haruta and Chika trying to do their best for this club, and thus, attempting to get more members, they are also solving mysteries going around the school that, very conveniently, involve introducing new characters that play an instrument (and with every solved mystery, it often results in gaining a new member
...
for the band club). While this seems like Haruchika is technically killing two birds with one stone, in the actual execution of it, it is anything but that.
Also, on a side note, I'd like to point out that I did not mention Haruchika as having romance (unless you count a silly crush), and, despite the perfectly sounding ship name of "Haruchika", if you are planning to watch this solely because it seems like a romance of the two main characters, don't bother as you will soon realize why in the first episode. Anyways, continuing on:
As said before, there is no effort to include the music genre, and instead, it is used as this loophole that gives the anime reason to lack depth in the mysteries; each mystery revolves around a problem of a person, and this person happens to be affiliated with a musical instrument, so the end result of obtaining said person to be in the band is more important than the actual mystery. But despite all that, the band rarely performs in the anime. The mysteries don't make up for this lack of music, either.
The mysteries themselves are simplistic, which is why they can be solved in the time span of one episode, even less with the amount of flashbacks they have to try to get you to care about the new character. It's with this lack of time that should raise alarms to how the "detectives", in this case, Haruta and Chika (though it's really just Haruta), analyze the clues and ultimately, solve the mystery.
Answer: He doesn't.
Haruta doesn't really investigate. He listens, is confused enough so that we have to wait about 5 minutes for him to figure out. In that 5 minutes he listens to the flashback of someone, and after the flashback is up, all of a sudden he has all the answers to the mysteries with about 5 clues to back his reasoning up even though the most clues he actually investigated amounts to one.
Chika baffles me even more. She's so useless in the mystery portion; the most she has contributed to the solving of a mystery is her lightheartedness and cheerfulness.
That's pretty much all the characters are: Haruta is the detective, Chika is the motivator, and everyone else is either someone that plays an instrument or someone that will help with the club. That's it. The characters are all one-noted, with none of them shown to have any other dimension.
Continuing on with the characters, their designs weren't as well thought out as I have seen them do with some of their other series. For me, one of my main problems were the eyes that try to go for mesmerizing but fail and turns out to be muddled, childish, and off-putting, all of which can equally describe the series as a whole.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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