Review of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

I started watching Suzumiya Haruhi with pretty high hopes because it is a really beloved series by a lot of fans but I have to admit that the hype killed off a bit of my final experience. Starting with something good episode 1 is fantastic and it sets a lot of the good things about this anime right off the bat: - The character designs and general art style are amazing as it is to expect form Kyoani - The protagonist, Kyon, is your typical high-school-slice-of-life anime protagonist type-B, the teenager with a moody mindset that is often lost in his own thoughts, the good thing isthat he's generally not as painfully dense as other type-B protagonists and he has an interesting relationship with Haruhi.
- Haruhi also looks like a rather interesting character, she's a genki girl that, as we see along the episode it looks like she has some things going on with her, also personal plus: I love her voice acting.
- The episode had a fluid direction that doesn't feel stale at any moment.
- Good OP, really iconic ED.

Episode 2, ironically enough, sets some of the worst features of this show that almost made me drop it as we discover that Haruhi is the kind of character that walks through the thin and blurry line of being an energetic bossy and cheerful genki girl and being a sassy bratty and selfish genki girl who thinks that the entire world revolves around her, on episode 2 we see the most extreme moments of that second part from her personality many times like taking advantage of another school club through some very contrived and to be quite honest quite bullshit reasoning and making another character outright cry while not even feeling sorry for it, even though these characters traits may be done on purpose and Haruhi may not be intended to be a likable character I don't feel like any of what happened in this episode was justified enough to not feel irritating and frustrating to watch.

On the next episode we get a very heady exposition dump of many characters talking together for several minutes while just sitting and staring at each other, these expositions reveal that this will not be a conventional slice of life anime but one that it will have certain things going on the background while our characters go with their day to day life, even though at the time it was a kind of interesting idea now with hindsight I have to say that the show really wasted some potential with that setting and didn't really do a lot with it, in this episode we also discover a few extra things about the past of the 3 secondary characters (Mikuru, Yuku and Itsuki) but I will talk about this later.

The arc after the plot revelations (ep 4 to ep 6, what is supposed to be the "ending") is what I consider the best arc of the entire show as it dives into the interesting parts of the background plot, but after this arc it falls off right back into the status quo with just normal slice of life episodes, to be honest some of those episodes are quite entertaining but they can be generally very hit or miss like the painfully boring one-off murder mystery of episode 10 and 11, after some more slice of life get to the final arc where another revelation happens and we end the anime with an open-ended closure (where the 2nd season will start)

The other 3 side characters are really plain and uninteresting walking archetypes with barely any development, each one of them are deeply related with the background plot but only one (Mikuru) gets some extra personality ad development from it, everything else about their personality goes around 3 very simple archetypes "the timid big boobed girl", "the kuudere loli" and "the nice guy": big boobed girl Mikuru is basically a fanservice dump that sometimes can get annoying with how submissive she is, kuudere loli Yuki has that "emotionless doll" personality trait that sometimes can get a bit corny (I normally don't find this kind of characters cheesy by itself but Yuki specifically has some scenes that have a pretentious feeling to them that can get pretty cheesy) and nice guy Itsuki... well... being a nice guy is literally everything about his entire personality, he's just kind of there being Kyon's exposition dump and being a nice guy. Also the background plot, even if as I said a few times is interesting, it's explained through tons of exposition.

In conclusion, even if I feel like this show will be very enjoyable for a lot of people to me it was kind of a mixed bag as it hits a few chords that really don't resonate well with me, the art and character designs are very iconic and the "final arc" is really the emotional height of the show but due to some of the more frustrating elements like Haruhi in general or every other character not having a lot of interesting development I can't really give a very high score to this show, I may some day watch season two as from what I know about this show it's actually the season that people think of when they think "Suzumiya Haruhi" containing many of the most iconic elements like the endless eight and the final concert but for now this will be it for me.