Hello, slightly late, but here I am with another episode review series. You may have been able to pick it up from some stuff I said on Twitter and from this post here, but, yeah, I planned to do episode reviews for Shikimori for quite a while now. I already did some for Komi, which was a fairly similar series, so I think I’ve got this, right? Yeah, I do, probably.

I love Rom-Coms, so let’s do this thing. I’ve also already read some of the Shikimori manga, and I’m going to keep up with both for certain reasons, so it should be interesting to see how they handle things. I think this adaptation will have some issues to overcome, just like Komi.

My Thoughts

So, starting out, I’m already very happy. The beginning of the manga is good, but it’s very quick to start. Very in your face with no real introduction. It’s just kind of a proof of concept, basically. The anime is actually taking the time to give us some additional stuff. Actually showing things about Izumi and how unlucky of a person he is.

That’s something I feel like the manga didn’t do all that well in the beginning, but it seems very much rooted into Izumi’s character from the beginning here, which I do love to see. It also allows Shikimori plenty of times to be cool and gives a valid reason as to why she always tries to help Izumi out. First impressions are just really good.

My biggest worry was that they would try to stick to the exact same pacing. I’ll tell you right now, that would never work. The series would be a mess. With such quick, short chapters, it needs to be entirely reworked to an anime format. They seem to be doing that. For instance, the very next scene is Shikimori and Izumi checking if they got in the same class again this year.

Seems like a natural progression from them walking to school together, right? Well, that scene is almost 100 pages after the first, but this is a good sign. It shows they’re going to rearrange things to make it a bit more coherent.

That’s really the name of the game for this episode. The timeline jumps back and forth a bunch, even cutting to something that happens near the beginning of the second volume. For a manga reader, this could seem weird, but it comes across, really, as a pretty flawless viewing experience. 

I imagine this would have been a fun series to work on. You have all of these events set up right in front of you, and it’s up to you to try and match these together in a familiar but fitting way. It was probably a really cool challenge. Like, did Shikimori bowling a perfect score have to happen now? No, but it also didn’t need to happen four or so episodes in. Just make things coherent, and you’re good.

The first episode was great at this and did really well on pretty much everything. Not only did it have a much better start, it managed to fill the middle with a bunch of scenes that felt like they naturally went together and then also managed to cap the episode off the same way it began. Shikimori reiterates her care for Izumi. We start with a couple in love and end with them doubling down on that, with a lot of context in between.

I’m very hesitant to say Shikimori is doing better than Komi because that series started to fall into madness a few episodes in. But, at a very first glance, Shikimori is surprising me, and I think it’s well on its way to making an even better and more put-together adaptation than the original. But, this is very, very early on, and we still have a long road to go. I hope you’ll continue to join me with this slightly more concise episode review format.

Thank you very much for reading

Cute love is good love.