The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya
76/100
TL;DR: a classic that has not aged that poorly. Recommend watching if you are into school-type weird comedy series.
Synopsis: Haruhi builds a club to find aliens, time travellers, and psychics, only for an alien, a time traveler, and a psychic to join it. Also, she is the God of her universe.
In terms of first impressions, the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is at the top of the list for one reason only: the protagonist, Haruhi. She’s just built different: highly extraverted, extremely eccentric, agentic, and emotionally stable — master morality: the anime character.
This is one of the few series where the protagonist and main character are different people: Haruhi is the main driving force, but the story is told through Kyon’s perspective, who helps narrates the series with his intrusive thoughts.
Frankly, none of the other characters are worth watching the show for: Kyon is a self-insert, Nagato is a generic kuudere, Asahina is cute but uninteresting, and the only distinctive trait I can parse from the other boy in the series is that he’s extremely emotionally stable. They are not bad characters per say, just that they primarily serve as complements to Haruhi.
Like all Haruhi reviews, I must discuss the elephant in the room: the “endless eight”, an arc where the main characters get stuck reliving their summer vacation. For eight episodes, the same base episode is repeated with minor fluctuations in detail, such as voicelines, clothing, and backgrounds. This was particularly frustrating for the community while it was airing…
Some defend the endless eight on the grounds that it emotionally drove home the repetitiveness of the experience of repeating the days. Admittedly, that is true, though eight episodes is far too excessive to do just that. Others have defended it on the grounds that it turned Haruhi Suzumiya into a classic, that people would not bother discussing it if it did not have that arc. This is something that can be statistically answered — did Haruhi’s popularity drop off as much as anime that aired and ended at roughly the same time, with roughly the same level of initial popularity? Likely not.
I managed to find four other series that were released at roughly the same time as Haruhi Suzumiya, and had comparable peak levels of popularity.
Overall, the rank order in terms of search interest is DtB > Toradora > Haruhi > Honey and Clover > Zero no Tsukaima. Now, it’s Toradora > DtB > Haruhi > Honey and Clover > Zero no Tsukaima. The rank order is basically the same, with the exception that Toradora has been kept alive for far longer than the others.
A second attempt:
Roughly the same story, except School Days was the anime that aged unusually well.
Although the endless eight is a bit boring, it’s much more similar to the rest of the anime than the fans want to admit it is; the anime is basically just Haruhi and the group doing random things together with very little plot or character progression. In that regard, you could argue that the endless eight is a parody of the anime itself, though I doubt that was the intention the production staff had. I would recommend skipping most of the arc — watch the first two episodes of it, and then skip to the last one.
One big reason this anime got so popular was the production value: it’s visually appealing, the voice acting is good, the music is there, and the openings/endings are solid. Personally, I’ve never liked Kyoani — the backgrounds are good but the character designs are lazy and generic, which gives the anime a dated atmosphere. It’s basically the platonic ideal of anime art that people who do not watch anime have.
Overall, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is a fine show and would recommend watching it, even if it has overall had a negative influence on the anime community.