Another

Another

Another Cover Art featuring Mei Misaki and Kouichi Sakakibara
Another Cover Art

Overview

Another is a horror-mystery anime which doesn’t do horror very well and then ruins the mystery part as well. That said, I didn’t think it was a bad watch, just not necessarily good.

The anime is about a class in which there is an “extra” person and because of that, for whatever reason, someone dies basically every week until it’s the extra person who dies. This extra person is someone who is already dead, a ghost if you will, but there is no way to tell who it is.

To solve this issue, the class has come up with a way to temporarily stop the “curse” from happening. They pretend that someone isn’t there even though they are and so that balances out the extra ghost person. Doesn’t make sense to you? Same here, so we’ll be looking at other things that don’t make sense next instead of the characters.


**Spoilers Ahead**

Complaints

So as mentioned, the basic plot of the anime already makes no sense. There’s a ghost person, so because of that people in the class die, but if you pretend that someone doesn’t exist then people are saved. In this year, Misaki was the one chosen to be ignored by the class.

However, when Sakakibara transfers into the class in the middle of the year, nobody mentions to him that he’s supposed to act like Misaki doesn’t exist and so this throws off the whole plan. In the end he becomes ignored by everyone just like her, but it’s already too late. No amount of thinking about it is going to make any of this make sense.

As I also mentioned, the anime isn’t really a horror anime, it just includes people dying in horrific ways for no reason. It has more to do with shock value than horror. I never really felt like there was any suspense.

Finally, the issue with the mystery part of the show. This is the biggest spoiler for the show so beware. The extra person isn’t actually one of the students, it’s the assistant teacher who nobody cares about. And apparently she was Sakakibara’s aunt.

It makes sense based off how the story was going that the extra person wasn’t going to be Sakakibara or Misaki, but the fact that they chose someone who nobody even cared about or noticed in the first place made it feel like it didn’t matter in the end.

Further, myself and others didn’t even realize the assistant teacher and Sakakibara’s aunt were the same person until after all of this was over and the show lays it all out. Even after that, some still didn’t realize this. The fact that the big reveal of the series went relatively unnoticed just goes to show how poor the plot was.

Kouichi Sakakibara and Mei Misaki dancing in class
Sakakibara and Misaki dancing

Conclusion

So sure, Another isn’t a very good horror or mystery genre anime, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad anime in general. It has Mei Misaki as a character after all and she’s a popular female lead similar to Rikka Takanashi from Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions! They’re essentially the same character after all.

Because of this, I ended up giving Another a 6/10. The main thing with this rating though is that we’re forgiving it for not being good at it’s intended genres because otherwise it would be a 5.

The OP for Another can be found here.

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