Review of Hand Shakers

First things first. My "reviews" system is explained on a blog entry. Which can be found through my profile. ------ ✦Story To keep it short. I did enjoy the concept and a lot of ideas in this Anime. The bonds, past and general lives that were presented here were quite conflicted that made the story fairly emotional. What I did not enjoy. I felt that the story was way too fast pace and another thing I disliked that the story constantly built us a fairly interesting world, powers and concept but it kept growing it's sense of mystery. Building sense of mystery in 12 episodes Anime is a seriouspunch in your face. It's one of those Anime that basically tell you to read the source material. As Anime simply fast quick paced intro to the world.

Another thing I will have to mention about each section of this review is the general mixed feelings I got from this series. As for story, I felt it had lot of good, but at the same time I cannot really praise it as much as I would like to. I simply cannot explain, but the emotion it gave me in general was "kinda good, but not quite" . Or to put it simply, mixed feelings is the cause of my inability to give it more credit/praise score-wise.

✦Art & Sound
Well, studio behind this is same as Anime "K", which means we have very unique, different, colorful and alive art & animation. Even if wasn't as impressive as in Anime just mentioned. It was still highly enjoyable. Action and some camera pans felt very awkward at times, and low framerate didn't make it any better. And another issue regarding Art would be that faced did feel quite "derp" now and then.

Aside that I gotta add I did love the fashion in this Anime. Very fancy clothes and FMC had some extremely fancy and pretty underwear.
Fanservice to be honest felt non-existent aside oppai-chan, which had some extreme jiggles. Felt odd but artsy, didn't feel anything else.

Music was funky, active and generally had presence and was quite "stylish". In this particular case I mean that it did fit well with Anime visual style. Nevertheless I found it superb.

And yes, again with Art I had some mixed feelings as most of it felt really good, whilst some things made it very odd.

✦Character
This Anime was way too short... essentially we got episodic Anime with different pair every episode.
But to put it plainly, hand shakers are essentially people with painful past thus developed into sad, empty and pitiful present selves. And "hand shakers" essentially gives characters hope to gain their dreams that simply were in emotional way quite ghastly? I don't really want to mention characters too much as there were plenty of them and we were given little of time to know them. So anything real would be spoiler.

But I have to add, that once again characters concept was fairly nice. Very dark and sad, but nice. All of the characters had their issues in life and essentially got scarred or damaged. Thus their hunt towards the "god" to achieve their dreams. While on the other hand, everything progressed too fast in this Anime that gave me difficulty to truly grow into characters or fully understand them. Essentially it gave you little tease to feel for the character, but by the time you will actually achieve that "feel", it was all over. As felt I felt characters were fairly ironic as well.

To sum it up, odd bunch of characters that I personally did enjoy as whole, BUT at the same time I would loved to know about them a fairly large portion more of. But eh "go read the novel", I guess.......

✦Enjoyment & Overall
Did mention most things in previous sections, but I can add that it was probably the most mixed feelings Anime I've watched in a very long while. As lot of things I loved about this Anime. Lot were sad, painful and probably even relatable, whereas at the same time I just feel I wasn't give enough time to feel those feelings as intended. Same with growing into characters. And that dark and cruel sense of mystery this Anime oozed off, was simply bullying at this point. There were simply so many things they explained, teased about, but simply didn't give us enough.

Average of this review probably would be higher than 6. But this is one of these odd little unpolished gems that this time around, simply won't get that praise from me just because I love Anime in general.

To wrap it up, it's unique Anime but suffers from excessive fast pacing and various "feeling vibe" issues, that might you think this Anime is bad or very good. But the truth is, it's middle line that has been approached and conveyed a tad bit incorrectly.

Moral of the story.
This Anime is weird....I cannot explain why.. it just is weird. Not even sure whenever in bad or good way...that is as well weird.
Weird. Period.