Review of A Lull in the Sea

I guess this is how women feel when they have a one-night stand with a charming guy who discharges during the foreplay and goes limp for the rest of the night. Climax came in episode 13 and we still had 13 more to go. Oh, boy, what a pain. I don't know what to think about the story in this one. The "sea folk vs land folk" concept seemed to have a lot of potential, but author was like "Screw that, I would rather make a bullshit love story featuring a sea god and a random land girl. God will then suddenly decide to throw achildish tantrum and destroy the world for no good reason. Genius.". Well, more importantly, the story focuses on the romantic relationships between the members of the main cast. You could describe it with a scheme similar to a protein metabolism pathway. I dare you to google it. One would think that developing so many connections would take a lot of time, but nope, we are practically presented with all of them in the fist half of the show, which means that the whole point of watching the later 13 episodes is basically just to see the final confessions and to see how the relationships relate to the gods affair.

Everything besides the story, pacing and structure is quite remarkable.
Landscapes and environments are spectacular, animation is good enough and visual character design gives a decent impression, even though characters do look pretty generic, but that's a problem of the source material.

Soundtrack and ambience are well utilized. There seems to be quite a lot of atmospheric volume alteration during the important scenes, which is a nice touch. It is a pleasure to listen to the OST album even outside of the show.

Characters are weak in terms of having plain personalities, but they do work pretty damn well together. Everybody feels as a character instead of being just some kind of utility used for progression. Also, many characters are actually relevant from start to finish, which is a great thing to see, romance genre seems to have the problem of disregarding many usable characters for the sake of MC and his/her love interests. There was still plenty of stupid and unnecessary melodramatic interaction, though... sometimes less is more.

I'm sad to give it such a low score, I had the impression this can get as high as 9/10 during the first half of the series, shame they decided to numb it down with the way they executed the later parts. It is still a nice show, but the disappointment is strong.

Story 3/10
Art 8/10
Sound 8/10
Characters 7/10
Enjoyment 5/10
Overall 6/10