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As a slice of life anime, it's kinda slightly above average and okay. As a Girl's Love anime, it's a rare bit of representation of realistic sapphic high school romance. In short, if this anime wasn't gay, I probably wouldn't be recommending it. But then again, if you've even come across this anime, it's probably because you were explicitly looking for gay content (like I was).

Characters: The characters are sweet, but don't really stand out much and leave you kind of wanting more depth. The redhead was probably my favourite character but the protagonist was cool, too.

Plot: The relationship that was central to the plot ... was... eh. Like, it was okayyyy. I feel like it takes a lot of guts to make a realistic gay anime and input a freaking heterosexual wedding scene in the climax lol. And the casual biphobia and the lack of plot-critique around age gap/grooming of teenagers by adults was just nasty, but I guess Japanese entertainment media really has a problem with that end of things.

Sound/art: Eh. You're not going to be watching the anime for the art and the soundtrack really made the anime quite maudlin and a bit cheesy but also bittersweet at times.

Overall: 6/10.

I watched the first episode of this show like 10 years ago at a friend's house and laughed super hard so I downloaded the entire season myself and tried to watch it. Thing is, the jokes get really stale for the next few episodes and the misogyny in the way the female characters are written and voiced is just incredibly overbearing. So much so that, for the next 10 years, I would try on multiple occasions to watch this show in its entirety and never get past episode 5 before putting it down.

Today I decided "why not" so I went ahead and watched all ... 12 episodes through pure force of will. I remembered the first episode gave me like 70% of all my laughs, then the long slog through to episode 6, then 30% of the laughs were scattered from episodes 7 to 12.

Thing is, because this series is basically "Yonkoma: The Anime", the entire point of this show is that the plot and characters don't really develop that much. I feel like someone could easily select the laugh-out-loud funny segments of this 12-episode show and turn it into a half-hour YouTube compilation. Of course, sadly, in that compilation, not a single segment would involve the girl characters of this show because they have all been written in such dreadfully shrill and unpleasant ways to the point of me being close to putting the anime away every time they're onscreen. I feel like the show writers wanted to make the show have an all-male cast and were forced to put girls in it somehow and so the writers made them impossibly annoying just to punish us. It's a pity because so much cool material could've been there if they didn't choose the path of making it a "Battle of the Sexes" type deal.

Anyway, 5/10, but a very uneven 5/10.

This is a slice of life anime about unconventional family situations and what it really means to be family. I have no intention of wanting to have kids and I'm not usually a slice of life anime girl but I would recommend this. It straddled the line between "poignant" and "cute" really well, and even in its version of "cute", it didn't exactly go for cheap cutesiness but more went for the realistic moments of cuteness you might experience between the hours of hard work raising a child. I liked how there were no clear "bad guys" in this anime even though it would've been ... very tempting to pass judgement on some characters. I also feel like an anime like this is very much about Japanese family cultures, which Western audiences may want to keep in mind.

It's only 11 episodes, so I'd recommend this anime as a chill and thought-provoking way to spend an afternoon with someone else, with pauses between episodes to talk about what "family" means.

Spoilers are in this review.

I'm writing this brief review as someone who tried to read the first few volumes of the manga, gave up because it was very written-by-a-teenage-boy, and then decided to watch the 90s anime in 2022 for the first time. I'm not a regular consumer of anime, but I am familiar with it, so keep that in mind.

> The plot: This anime is full of character studies and political intrigue and the ending is very enthralling overall. Mostly, you'll be watching for the characters Guts and Griffith and maybe a bit of Casca. I feel like Casca gets a lot of misogynist ... crap thrown at her in the writing, though, but it did feel like the writer genuinely loved her as a character (not more than Guts though, that became clear lol). I'm very much a person who watches things for the plot and characters and I didn't feel disappointed here overall.

> Soundtrack: Sometimes the soundtrack is amazing and really ties a scene together and other times it's cheesy and recycled. It's hit-and-miss. If I tell myself "this is a 90s anime, let it be a little cheesy", then I can get by and let myself enjoy the times that the soundtrack drew me in.

> Art/animation: The art was mostly pretty good for a blurry 90s anime being watched in 2022. I really loved the monster designs. The animation was... well there were a lot of battle scenes done as still drawings. And whoever designed the costumes clearly couldn't decide whether the events took place in the 1600s, 1700s, or 1800s--it was a jarring mish-mash that historically went all over the place. This anime is also frequently quite gory, but I didn't find that as distracting and off-putting as the fan service (which was thankfully quite infrequent). Some people would watch this for the art, but not me, I guess.

> Script: This was occasionally brilliant, but mostly awful. It was so incredibly dull and unimaginative, I feel like letting a toddler write the script (for the first season, particularly) would have been a better choice. My head felt like it was made of bricks just listening to it. It seems that all the brilliant moments in the script are either from or about Guts or Griffith in the form of some profound monologue that emerges from nowhere like a diamond in a sea of shit. Sometimes I laughed at the cringe, sometimes I was in deep thought at some philosophical concept... the quality of the script definitely took some twists and turns.

Content warnings: Blood/gore/death (lots), r*pe, war, animal deaths, torture, and probably some other stuff.

Overall? 7.5/10. Definitely don't regret the time I spent binge-watching this flawed gem, it scratched an itch that would be felt by fans of Game of Thrones or the cosmic horror genre.