If you’re new to There Goes My Kokoro (or have just forgotten because it has been a while), I, Crispy N64—founder, owner, and mastermind behind this wonderful blog—am very reluctant when it comes to dropping shows. There came a time when I used to power through everything, no matter how terrible. Times have changed, as a while back I realized life was too short to waste on shitty anime…but apparently not short enough for me to walk away without at least writing a post to justify why. So, in the true spirit of New Year’s Resolutions, here’s a bunch of shows I’m giving up on!

Dagashi Kashi

5/12 episodes

Season 2 coming out soon has reminded that I don’t really care for this show much. If I’m being honest with myself, I’ll never get back to it, and so it would just be better if I moved it from “On-Hold” limbo to the definitive drop pile. Everything that could be said about this show, has…but I’ll say it again, despite sadly not having an original opinion on the matter. Dagashi Kashi is very much a thinly-veiled candy/snack commercial stretched into a 12-episode series.

The setup up is simple, the execution is even simpler, and the comedy the show puts forth is worth only about a fair chuckle on a good day. Sure, the purple hair girl is really hot, and it’s fun watching things get put into her mouth, but…uh, where was I going with this? Erhm, anyway, there really doesn’t seem to be anything worthwhile here, just a small handful of hackneyed romance and drama plot points, tied together by a bunch of half-assed gags involving brand name snack foods. Also, the main protagonist’s name is Coconuts.

Sakura Quest

16/25 episodes

I’ve gone into what is wrong with this show on multiple occasions, and so this will hopefully be the last. Sakura Quest’s first step was an utter stumble, one that it unfortunately couldn’t pick itself up from, at least for an entire half of the series. Barely existent character motivations are used to build a pathetically weak structure of which the anime just can’t support itself on. For one reason or another, 5 girls end up working for a local tourism bureau in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. Only one of them seems to have a strong connection to the town and a real motivation for wanting to see it thrive, while the rest are just there. They’re each supposed to have a reason for being there, not as a rule of writing a good story, but as a simple, half-hearted attempt the show makes before trying to progress the story.

Sakura Quest wants to pretend its characters have strong, individual personalities before moving on to them working as a group, but spends no more than two episodes forming the team to do so. If the show is supposed to an origin story of this tourism bureau, delve deeper into the origin at the start! If the tale is supposed to be of these girls miraculously coming together to make an old, countryside town thrive once again, then it should either start with an interesting buildup of the task force, or skip past their formation and get right into the work. Maybe the creation of this tourism bureau just simply “happened”, and that would be fine, so long as time wasn’t spent half-assed-ly explaining it.

Through their work, we could slowly learn more about the characters, like in Shirobako. The show could’ve been about the actual work they did, with characters subtly developing on the side until at some point, the audience finds themselves actually caring about them. And I think this is makes me the most frustrated. This show comes from the same studio that brought us Shirobako, AND Hanasaku Iroha! Sakura Quest actually isn’t a terrible show, but when compared to the studio’s history, just looks like a pile of garbage. We all know P.A. Works has the connections to bring in directors with vision and the skills necessary to create something of value, so it’s just a mystery as to why this underwhelming project ever came to be in the first place.

Utawarerumono: The False Faces

15/25 episodes

Why did I start watching this miserable excuse of a show, let alone finish 15 EPISODES? Honestly, I can’t remember. There must’ve been something wrong with me. Anyway, the only description I could give of this show would be this: There are feudal catgirls with catgirl ears that are folded downward rather than the usual “pointed-to-the-sky” look. A guy with amnesia stumbles upon one and she takes him in. Then there’s this war, and some sort of politics game going on that this guy finds himself stumbling into…but not before stumbling into a big ol’ bundle of pussy! Get it? Pussy like cats, but also like girls, because it’s an adaptation of an eroge? Ha ha. Like most eroge adaptations, however, it doesn’t seem like he’ll be picking a route, nor sleeping with any of them. Which just leaves this series in a boring state of very tame ecchi-ness sprinkled around a story that doesn’t make any sense to me. All I ask is that it either commits to the lewdness, gives me a worthwhile story, or both! Instead, it fails all of the above, and so I will be dropping it, along with the other anime listed here today.

Thanks for reading, and hope to see you tomorrow for another day of Feature Week 2018!