Elegant Yokai Apartment Life

When I think of how best to summarize Youkai Apartment no Yuuga na Nichijou I think it’s like a student's passion project. Its heart is in the right place and it's trying its best to make the audience happy. Although it may be a bit on the amateurish side and it’s clumsily made, it’s so endearing in its struggle that you can’t help but cheer it along regardless. Story: 5/10 It’s slice of life so there's no major overarching plot. In the first half of the show, the main character Inaba goes to the wonderful Youkai Apartment and we meet all of the fanciful inhabitants. Most episodestake place within the apartment, at Inaba’s high school, or in the town he lives in. From his new roommates, he learns that about the good and bad ghosts that inhabited his world all his life. This structure is used through most episodes of the first half of the show; Inaba encounters an evil ghost, exorcises it, then offers a life lesson to close off the chapter. Many of the lessons are what you’d expect to hear from parents or teachers, but they’re the kind of lessons anyone should be taught at least while they’re growing up. Some of the morals were; do right by others, respect your elders, always be polite when you’re a guest, so on and so forth. While the lessons sometimes feel a bit forced into the show, they always do a great job of forming the main characters into role models as the is value in their words. Even if the characters come off a bit heavy-handed that’s part of their charm I suppose. There are only minor side stories that compiled together take up most of the screen time in the later episodes. After one minor plot thread is resolved a new one appears. One pretty big disappointment with the story is that the supernatural element becomes little more than an afterthought during the second half of the show. I really started to wonder if that “Youkai” in the title was really justified at all given how infrequently it was utilized by the show. The whole second half of the show felt overall very unnecessary. While there’s still a lot to enjoy, focusing on the Inaba’s classmates was a mistake. It totally wasted the far more interesting residents of the Youkai Apartment. Character: 6/10 Your enjoyment of this show depends on how much you like the characters. Some of them have enough charm and charisma to keep you entertained while their on screen, but others just blend together due to a lack of defining traits. Nothing much really happens to the characters after 26 episodes. Looking back on the experience, for all the life lessons they preach we learn very little about the cast and they don’t grow or change in ways to make them believable as people. Many of the residents of the Youkai were still being depicted as lead characters by the end, with close-ups and all, yet I couldn’t for the life of me remember their names or why they’re special enough to deserve individual screen time. Art: 5/10 The animation isn't outstanding because there isn’t a whole lot of it. Thanks to solid directing, I was always able to understand what was occurring in scenes. The Yokai Apartment is well designed so you understand where scenes take place in reference to the room layout. Each character has a simple design, at first they may look generic but they’re given life through well-defined personalities and enough chances to show their varied expressions. Sound: 5/10 An upbeat opening prepares the viewer for an easygoing 20 minutes; the soundtrack that backs most scenes is really peppy and rhythmic. While it's not the most complex scores I’ve heard, it does a great job at setting the atmosphere and always feels appropriately used. Amateurish voice acting, hilarious engrish. The main character is in the Engrish Club so you better get used to hearing the actors struggle through their English lines (because it never gets better). Enjoyment: 7/10 It's melodramatic at times, but its uplifting tone prevents the drama from becoming overwrought. Sometimes I found the long scenes (in the second half) of characters conversing boring because the topics wouldn’t interest me. Those conversations add very little to the characters so it was inevitable I would lose track of who’s who. Also, there’s a ton of fujobait in this show, not that I'm complaining, it actually made the whole thing way funnier and feel self-aware. Overall Score: 5.6/10 Youkai Apartment no Yuuga na Nichijou is a surprisingly lively ghost story that is content with its simplicity, occasionally it steps out of its comfort zone with varying degrees of success. Despite its flaws, it is uplifting enough to be watchable. I feel like I may have harped on it a bit too hard because it’s clearly not a show with a high budget. However, it is asking a lot of the audience to devout around 10 hours in total to it. 26 full-length episodes was definitely longer than it needed to be. I feel kind of bad for being so hard on the underdog, but even as when I went into it with underdog level expectations it’s still far from being great.

For me it was a very relaxing anime to watch when compared to my typical bloody, action packed, and/or strange anime that I enjoy. I recommend this one to people that enjoy thinking about psychology and sociology. The show is focused on speaking about and showcasing aspects of the human mind. A great watch. Now, I'm going to watch some bloody anime lol. Geez they want my review even longer? Why is that, the show was good and all i have left to talk about are spoilers. Even longer? So the main character is often hinted at being gay which was very humorous to me.The show gave me a lot of laughs.

Overall this show feels weirdly incoherent and not sure what it's trying to be - you'd think from the title it'd focus on the youkai inhabitants of the apartments but in the first 12 episodes only one inseparable pair of the youkai are given a full episode dedicated to their story. In fact, of the 5 youkai that appear in more than 1 episode with any role, 3 are unable to talk and 1 can only say "welcome back". On its own that's just misleading given the title of the series but the problem is the character work is poor and the plots and emotionalarc are a bit of a mess. I guess the closest thing to a theme of a series is the main character's maturation but the problem is we never really see him changing - he makes references to how he was "before" yet we're never given a glimpse of how he lived before moving out from his adopted family past their existence so there's no sense of development. At the same time, regardless of what he says he often behaves in weird exaggerated ways that don't match the morals he's supposedly learning. It's not clear what he wants either. The other characters are also given very little development - even though a few human characters appear in almost every episode, there's not really much difference between most of them. One is hotheaded, one has an impressive aura, but most of the lines could come from any of them. Lots of talking seemingly "deep" things that aren't particularly profound. We don't really get a sense of their lives or anything either. The plots are... flimsy. Within a day of watching the first 13 episodes I could only remember a couple of them. The last 3 of the first 13 episodes form a particular mini plot arc but it's extremely full of tedious filler dialogue and plot to pad out something that turns out unexciting. One episode is mostly taken up by "researching" whether something is possible that they literally just witnessed happen. There's no real excitement or emotional resonance except in one early episode because the characters are so thin and nothing much happens. One weird thing I noticed a few times is extreme emotional whiplash - the series is pretty lighthearted but there are a few flashbacks to stories of violent murders and then near instant return to lightheartedness. In the second half and the problems are basically the same. The youkai play very little role, which is a shame as the designs are cute. The second series revolves around school life but again the new characters are mostly weak and the series long arc around what could vaguely be described as the "antagonist" school characters is really really poor with very little development and with an unbelievably weak resolution. I complained about the moral messages in the first half but there were a few really awful ones here and some that contradicted themselves - early on there's a "don't judge people before knowing their whole story" moral *right next* to the same characters making up a whole story for another character and being very judgemental based on a single negative experience and their tastes in art! Overall the series felt like it wasted potential with a few real plot and dialogue clangers. I just wanted more youkai, mostly.

Well, slice-of life in the apartment with the good ghosts and stuff like that... well... i kinda missed the point to be fair. Character developement practicaly didnt happend, and overall it felt, like the story is not moving in any direction, which didnt actualy happend even in the final episode in my opinion. If I was to say, that this show felt plain as the chest of the loli character, i would be praising it. Still, the animation was nice and there wasnt any unbearable fanservise included, so it was at least watchable. In comparation with the Magetsukan Kitan (manga with the similar story) I must saythis one is on the loosing end.