Review of Shakugan no Shana: Season I

Shakugan no Shana manages to be one of the most unbalanced watches I've had in recent memory. It has strong character development, and basically nothing of anything else. The characters really are great, especially early on in the show. Shana and Yuji are especially good, though some of the side characters also get decently developed. Sure, it's somewhat predictable, but considering that most anime doesn't include any character development, it's easy to praise the show for it. The villains are significantly less developed and mostly just feel like they're out of a B-movie. They're wacky enough to keep you entertained, but nothing to write homeabout.

The show does drama really well, and manages to create realistic feeling situations where there is interpersonal conflict between the characters. One thing a lot of shows do wrong is bringing in drama by introducing it from outside sources. Having the conflict be between characters you already know and like definitely gives it more a weighty punch though, and it's easier to get invested. It helps that the drama makes sense, mostly.

Unfortunately, this isn't primarily a romance/drama show. The plot and world-building seems interesting at first, but it quickly becomes a complete and utter disaster. I have NEVER seen a show that is so full of plot holes. Literally nothing makes sense. The last arc of the show is ESPECIALLY confusing. I don't know if this is because the adaptation is particularly poor, or because the light novel's were just poorly thought out, but something clearly went wrong here. I think that if fully-realized, the plot could've actually been good.

The pacing is also pretty bad. Too many filler shots of panning over characters faces or backgrounds. There are also a lot of reaction shots, or reused shots that slow things down. The pacing in the last arc is especially bad and certain fights drag on forever when they should've probably ended quickly.

Speaking of the animation, it's bad. The fight scenes look especially ugly. I also noticed that any shot of characters running (that include their legs) looks really unnatural.

Overall the show is kind of generic, but the characters were interesting enough to keep me watching. If you solely want to watch this because the plot sounds interesting, I would avoid it.