GO-SICK

GO-SICK REVIEW 

Anime:- Gosick
Genre:- Supernatural/Mystery/Romance
Number of Episodes:-24
Rating:- Animation and Artwork-7/10, Music:-7.5/10, Story-6/10,  Characters-5/10, Enjoyment-9/10(34.5/50)

To review Gosick is a really tough job. This anime has so many things going right for it and the fact that yet it fails to satisfy is what makes it so difficult. I would not go so far as to call this anime the anime of two halves but from the time the anime changed its ED it lost its charm. Let us talk about the positives first and then we will try to figure out where it went wrong.

The artwork is really nice for the setting in early 1900s. Its nice to see all those horse drawn carriages and the different dressing sense of people of that era. One thing striking is the Japanese still wore kimono in that era whereas the Europeans had a distinctly different dress sense. The animation is nice too, par for the course for a 2010 anime, nothing to spectacular but does its work.

The OP is really good, it has a light ring to it and sets you up nicely. But whats really good is the first ED. It has taken its place among my favourite EDs and perfectly matches with the tone of the show. Its really a shame that they had to change it and I didnt like the second ED as much. In anime music was nothing spectacular so I had to give an average score. The voice acting however was really average. It doesnt really bring out the characters and feels just vanishes into the countless ordinary voice acting of various anime you have watched. You dont remember much of the dialogues after you complete the anime, thats as much a fault of script as the voice acting.

The story had a tremendous amount of promise. It starts of episodic or 2-3 episodes together in a story. Initially it feels like a detective mystery anime. It would have been good if it had stayed so. But the author had other ideas, linking the female protagonist to a dark and oppressed past is okay if you have a good story to back it up. The author actually tried to. Linking the world wars to the main story line was a wonderful idea. Some of the cases had WW I linked with it too. An oppressed mother was also there to support the story to boot, with a travelling magician helping her and stuff. “The eternal love of the mother for her child with her making the final sacrifice to save her child” idea was there as well. There was a nice little romance between the main characters. The cases were presented in a way in which the viewer can solve them if he thought hard enough all the clues were there. So you could think with the show. I mean all this essentially is the formula for a really great show and for the firSt 13 episodes I could not understand how it can go wrong. Well, for the last 13 episodes too I could not understand how it went wrong but I will try my best to figure out.

The story lost its thrilling nature after episode 13. Episode 17 pissed me off. And yet there were flashes of previous brilliance scattered here and there in some of the episodes. The thing is there are two ways to make someone look intelligent. Make him/her unbelievably intelligent and get an almost equally intelligent antagonist, or make him/her decently intelligent and surround him/her with dumb characters. Sadly Gosick does the latter. The male protagonist is as dumb and cheesy as they come. The ending dialogue of the anime is as cheesy as they come. These were two big flaws in the anime. Then, trying to mix up supernatural and logic leads to disastrous effects most of the time. Gosick is a living proof. Also initially starting off with an episodic tone and trying to “increase” the number of episodes involved in those small stories is a nice idea but here they faltered somehow. They made terrible use of the characters they created. There is almost little to no character development of any of them, which results in little to no empathy at their deaths. The only good part was the mother-daughter bonding and the rest somehow left very little mark though all the ingredients were there. So in the end the problem with this one would be wasting the potential of a great cast of characters, losing the thrilling nature of the first half by trying too much which draws the viewer and cheesy script writing. Yes that should do it.

Well I wouldn't say I didn't enjoy the show but I hoped to enjoy it more.

Final Verdict:- Its a show that I would recommend if you like mystery which are solvable if you use your head, it wont mindfuck you but that's not a bad thing, also you might be left a little dissatisfied at the end with the show but you have to live with that. Its worth watching, its not a bad one.