Overview:
Eita has returned to the town he used to live in during his third year of high school. As he is reunited with old friends we see these characters prepare to leave high school and figure out what they want to do next.
Review:
As you can probably tell from the overview, this story isn’t exactly rushing to do much. It really is just the story of the daily lives of these high school students as they think about their future and the people around them. At the core of the story are a couple of romances as Eita’s friend Soma is the love interest of Natsume but has his eyes on the shy Morikawa, and Eita’s had a long time unrequited crush on Natsume but gains the attention of Ena, a junior in the photography club.
And that is more or less all she wrote about this one. The characters are all very believable as high school students just going through the motions of finishing school and second guessing the choices they’ve made for what comes next. They hesitate, don’t have the conversations they need to have, come up with silly rules (I’ll confess if) and basically mope when things don’t go their way. Despite that, it ends up being an oddly compelling if fairly forgettable viewing experience.
The animation definitely suffers though. These characters look fine when having conversations but motion (particularly running) ends up looking painfully awkward and to be honest I really just wanted the characters to stay still because at times it was outright distracting.
Otherwise, there isn’t a lot to say about this. I really enjoyed spending time with this group of characters. They frustrated me at times and made silly choices but they were all characters I could relate to in that I could probably think of half a dozen or so people in my real like that would do exactly what they were doing. The pace of the story is pretty slow and the final episodes really drag, but for a once watch through, this is certainly pleasant enough.
If you go in expecting a fairly low key romance/slice of life thing, you will probably be pretty happy with this one.
Episode Reviews:
- Episode 1: Just Life
- Episodes 2 & 3: Imagine a Transfer Student Came and Nothing Happened
- Episode 4: Sometimes When You Break Through A Wall All You Get Is A Broken Wall
- Episode 5: They Made a Baseball Mitt Look So Alone
- Episode 6: Making Decisions is Hard
- Episode 7: Just Because You Are Indecisive Doesn’t Mean you Can Deny Others
- Episode 8: When You Know The Path Is Wrong
- Episode 9: Renewed Purpose
- Episode 10: Being Resolved Doesn’t Mean You Don’t Falter
- Episode 11: This Certainly Is Roundabout
- Episode 12: The End
Thanks for reading.
Karandi James
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Yea production had a lot of issues towards the end of the series, hence the weird voice actor episode and a few melting animations. I have a link to the SakugaBlog entry about it in my review. I thought the series was pretty good, I just felt that the ending was a huge let down as they built up a lot of energy and didnt follow through with it.
The ending did fizzle a little. I didn’t hate it but it felt like we needed something more. Then again, it did stay very true to real life in that there was no grand finish. Life just kind of continued on.
The problem was that they were leading to a grand finish, but just stopped short, opting for them just meeting at college.
I enjoyed Just Because a lot! It was kind of peaceful to watch, aside from what the characters choices. I’ve heard that the productions had a lot of issues, so thats why the motion had sucked a lot.
It was kind of a peaceful watch.
This anime was pretty good! The production issues aside, the story, characters and everything was pretty engaging, and furthermore, it was relatable. And the opening and ending songs are really good too!
Well, as long as you don’t have the hopes for a masterpiece, I would say this anime is pretty much something like Tsuki ga Kirei.
I think I preferred this to Tsuki ga Kirei because I found the cast a little more relatable. Definitely if you go in with average expectations you’ll probably find something to enjoy here. It isn’t my usual kind of show and yet I stayed pretty engaged during the season. That said, I’m probably not going for a second viewing of it.