Review of Ghost Stories

The show's English dub makes its lackluster plot and repetitive storylines bearable. Let's be honest, the story is absolute nonsense, every episode has the same basic plotline, and the show relies a lot on the character's making ridiculously poor choices to move along. All in all, without the English dub it's just a crappy show that isn't scary or heartwarming at all. The reason I give this show an 8 is because the voice actors did an outstanding job delivering the jokes and the writing team did an outstanding job writing them. The show can be enjoyed to the fullest only if youhave knowledge of American pop culture, as there are plenty of references and jokes that only make sense if you know who people like Christian Slater and other celebrities are. A lot of the jokes are reference based, mercilessly poking fun at popular celebrities, movies, and sometimes TV shows. If you don't watch anything other than anime or have no interest in pop culture, a LOT of these references will go straight over your head and a lot of the lines that are meant to be funny will just sound stupid.

But references are only the beginning of the humor. The next thing that the writers did was turn otherwise uninteresting characters into wacky, hilarious crazies each with their own unique trait that drives a lot of the jokes. One character even has 90% of his lines turned into incoherent mumbling and is dubbed mentally retarded by the rest of the cast, and it is hilarious. Be warned, the cast has no soft spot for sensitive topics. Another character becomes an (extremely) devout Christian, which makes for some of the best lines in the show. So even if you're not into reference based humor, the characters are hilarious, too.

Even so, the jokes aren't reserved to just references and character quirks, some of the lines are genuinely funny and will have you laughing out loud. Scenes are twisted to look like something they're not, lines and sometimes conversations are completely omitted in favor of funny banter, and there is generally never a serious moment in the show. Don't come in expecting a plot, or anything serious at all, because anything that could get serious are starts becoming serious is thrown out the window in favor of a ridiculous script that sometimes isn't even relevant to what's going on in the scene except for the fact that the facial expressions and actions match the dialogue.

All in all, the show is great. It gets an 8 because there's no point in judging the show for its story or its art or its music, because it's really just like stand up comedy. It's joke after joke after joke and every episode brings something new. The only reason this is getting an 8 is because sometimes it felt like jokes were coming in just for the sake of messing up the original script or saying something stupid in lieu of saying something serious. There's a lot of hit or miss humor, and to say that all of it was a hit for me would be a lie. I laughed, a lot, but sometimes it felt like jokes were just being shoe-horned into the script. They could have handled it a lot more tastefully and built up to the jokes, but due to the way its set up you can tell when they're going to come, just wait for one or two lines that sound like they're actually from the original script and you can almost guarantee the next line will be a joke.

So, from my standpoint, while the show was genuinely hilarious, and that's really all that matters here (if you're looking for anything besides nonstop humor find something else), it could have been done a little better, and for that reason it gets an 8. I still highly recommend it to anybody who just wants to laugh.