Back to kon22's Profile kon22's Profile

So, Nazotokine. "An anime about puzzles". I was interested in this since it was announced, since I love puzzles and having an anime which focus uniquely in this was interesting enough. So as soon as it was available in crunchyroll, I watched it.

...aaand it was kind of a disappointment. First, there's the lenght of the episodes: only 7 minutes, minus ending and opening. That leaves us with 5 minutes of actual show at most. This makes the whole experience pretty lacking in content, but it also ruins the pacing, since Tokine doesn't even solve the puzzles in the same episode they're presented. Then there's the ... obvious lack of a budget. A lot of the art is static, there's a tooon of montages in the show instead of actually animated scenes, and some bad CGI here and there. And then the actual puzzles. They aren't bad; some were pretty smart, I thought, but they get solved extremely fast and doesn't give the viewer a chance to solve them himself. It doesn't help that most are in japanese, but I can't really blame that in the show.

It's not all bad, though. While the characters are nothing to write home about, I do like how they're all young adults working in a company and not highschool girls. That was a nice change of pace from the usual stuff you see. Tokine (the main girl), too, is really funny. The story is just there, but I honestly don't care, since it's just an excuse to get some puzzles on screen. The opening and ending were both really good, specially the opening. A nice detail I noticed is that during the ending of each episode, there's a similar puzzle (but different) to the one Tokine did in the episode for the viewer to solve.

Anyway. I seem to have talked way more about the bad than the good. So why am I giving it a 6, then? Am I being too generous because this anime so very specifically panders at my love for puzzles? There's a little bit of that, yeah. I'm also cutting it some slack because of the obvious production limitations it had. But all that aside, I did enjoy Nazotokine and I'd be excited for a 2nd season. It's a shame, though, Had this been a bigger project, I'm sure it would have been a lot better.