Final Impressions / First Impressions / Glasslip

「流星」 (Ryuusei)
“Shooting Star”

Now that the end has finally come, I’m just going to jump straight into final impressions. Not necessarily because I don’t want to say anything in particular about this final episode but it’s more like I don’t have anything to say. If anything, I would sum this episode as more of the regular rigmarole that had me thinking, “This could maybe turn into something awesome if it weren’t the last episode.”

Final Impressions

For a show that I was totally pumped up about after someone linked me to it on our IRC channel, I’m really disappointed that it didn’t turn into the show I hoped for. Surprisingly though, it seems that this show ended up being really polarizing — even with a majority of the readers voicing their complaints week by week, there were some who said that the show just worked for them. So before we jump into the real impressions, let me say that there were some genuine points throughout the show that really worked for me.

As a show billed as a romanticish slice-of-life with some fantasy elements weaved into the mix, there wasn’t enough of any single part. Sure there were some romantic antics amongst the main cast that were resolved but none of them had any of the impact you’d expect from a show that promised we’d see some romance. Sure, we had guys and girls fighting over Touko but there was never a point where I didn’t think Kakeru would overtake the others. Which to me is a little odd since it felt like their relationship felt awfully forced. Starting from a shared interest in the fragments of the future (I’ll get into that in a little), it seemed to just jump from acquaintances to star-crossed lovers without any of the passion or flag-setting occurring. Then you have the side characters who we’re led to believe ended up with their own happy endings but honestly, there wasn’t enough buildup to really make us feel anything for them.

So, you’d think that if romance wasn’t the focus then the whole fantasy element would be, right? Especially when the show throws in Kakeru having conversations with himself, RIGHT? But in the end all we got was a half-baked explanation about things that modern science would probably classify as an explosive imagination. Toss in last week’s episode where Touko ended up in an alternate dimension and you have a hot mess of topics that never really get tied up.

All that said, there was something that this final episode helped me realize. If you take this show as a depiction of a teen’s final summer, I think you can justify most of what happens. Maybe the point of everything is that during that hectic time where your decisions could ultimately decide where you end up in life, lots of things that don’t make sense happen. So in the end, maybe it’s really about the crazy journey you take to really find out what you want?

Anyways, while the show personally didn’t do much for me, I wouldn’t say it was a complete train wreck. There were certain elements like Hina and the adorable relationship between her parents that managed to capture my attention when the main story almost had me turning away. Toss in Yuki and Yanagi who I’m assuming got into a successful relationship with each other and I had most of my wants fulfilled (Yeah, Hiro and Sachii are okay but still YukixYanagi). When everything is said and done, I don’t think I would recommend this show to anyone besides those looking to fill their P.A. Works collection.

And that’s about wraps it up! Thanks again to everyone who’s been following the posts. I know the show wasn’t what we expected but at least we stuck it through till the end right!? See you next season!

71 Comments

  1. It was quite disappointing. I came away feeling like nothing really happened, and the MCs weren’t really deserving of that title. Just think about how much more they could have done if Jonathan was the protagonist.

    Trippwire
    Reply

      1. This show is on the level of TRC in terms of mind screw. God, I understand some of it but really I am quite lost. I can’t say it’s bad – I love it. But what in the world you call a show that makes being lost an appeal factor?

        KF
        Reply

  4. You’d like to think when you watch a show that it’s leading you somewhere, but all we got with this show was Touko’s Mom saying “oh yeah, I used to hallucinate but I grew out of it.”

    It started off with a group of five friends. The normal ones paired up, the fifth strange one hooked up with a strange guy with negative charisma, who in the end probably left to tour with his Mom. And there were chickens.

    That last paragraph summarizes 13 episodes.

    flap
    Reply

  5. In the end, I had no idea what it was even about. This has to be P.A. Works’ worst anime. As a reminder, last summer they had Eccentric Family, which was brilliant. A shame that we had to get stuck with Glasslip this summer…

    Ultimately, I only liked Hiro and his older sister. They had a cute, believable sibling relationship. And to a lesser extent, Hina was a decent character too, and a nice sister.

    Really, the best thing to come out of this show were all the comments about Jonathan. We were so bored and frustrated with this show that we were forced to make jokes about chickens.

    Jonathan best girl.

    Mormegil
    Reply

    2. Eccentric Family was really good. This show seemed to be going nowhere fast from Episode 1 too me.

      Okay, so I bailed after falling asleep on Episode 1 but still followed this blog. Because, you know, it was PA Works. Was hoping it would make a good turn and I was going to marathon through this show.

      Rick Anime
      Reply

      1. After much consideration I think the fragments were possible futures that manifest in the form of other dimensions, the three Kakerus are form other possible futures. For example one Kakeru was living in the town and the one who moved was was Touko.

        haseo0408
        Reply

  7. Hardest riddles this season in descending order :
    3.) Riddles on zankyo
    2.) 1000-7 from the last ep of tokyo ghoul (srsly.. mortal pain! you don’t know the answer to that >_<)
    1.) … The point of this show. (Someone help me solve this !)
    Was this show a metaphor ? srsly x_X

    Shensu3
    Reply

    1. That makes sense, and it would have been a good story if they actually, you know, told a story based on those themes. People generally watch TV to turn their brain off and experience a show, not to figure out what it’s about. What we got was basically a mystery show that you had to solve yourself, when the show was billed as a slice of life teen romance.

      flap
      Reply

      1. Reddit sure doesn’t try to hide the amount of flak they have for this show. But really, any show that requires a symbolism lesson to understand is just…

        I’ll let you finish this sentence yourself.

        lytterbug
        Reply

  10. Hmm. So Yanagi mentions the word epiphany this episode. If you look up the word epiphany, you’ll see that it means “experience of sudden and striking realization”. The so called “fragments” are pretty much just epiphanies. Somehow they are tied to a person’s desires, and as Touko’s mother put it, they seem to stop occurring once they aren’t needed anymore. In her mother’s case, it was when she got with Touko’s father. In Kakeru’s case, it was when he had someone who could give him happiness–Touko. Now how does this tie in to the overall story and development? Well…everyone was just really confused and no one in the audience had any epiphanies other than the sudden realization that this show went to great lengths to make us confused and lose faith in it altogether.

    Could it be a show about the epiphanies of a young girl growing up into adolescence in her last summer as Takaii mentioned? Yes. Did it make you feel satisfied watching it? For me, no.

    I understand some people have different tastes, but I feel like this was either a poor attempt to be deep and interesting, OR it was trying so hard to be deep and interesting that the writers lost the audience partway. Now if you lose your audience when you are telling a story, well then you aren’t very good at telling stories now are you?

    This show seems like it’ll be that awkward person at the party that has the FUNNIEST joke to tell and says it a every party, but messes up the delivery every single time. And it seems like it fits that role in P.A. Works’ catalog of shows.

    As for the very end, it seems fitting that they would chose to leave Kakeru’s presence ambiguous and have everyone confused as to whether he was there or left with his mother. The optimist in me says that he finally doesn’t need that tent anymore since he found his place to be happy, and that Touko’s epiphany at the end was that Kakeru now attends their school. (Or his room is finally ready after how long if you want to look at it that way lol) The pessimist in me says that Kakeru left with his mother and Touko still has a reason to have these epiphanies, which is her desire to see Kakeru.

    Annyms
    Reply

    1. I think you’re right in that is what this show was trying to say but somehow it just lost me along the way. The main couple of Touko and Kakeru just didn’t seem to work for me somehow, mainly I think because I thought he was a jerk. The show still managed to have interesting characters … but overall it was just very clumsy.

      Scruffy
      Reply

  13. I have mixed feelings about this show.

    On one hand, the characters worked for me. They reacted largely like reasonable people would – a minimum of melodramatic histronics, little need to unnaturally spell out anything for the sake of the audience, displaying a wonderful balance between friendly intimacy and personal reservedness. Everyone in this show takes affirmative, reasonable, and reasoned action towards solving their personal issues. I like that.

    On the other hand, themes? Narrative? Were those around? There was a lot of abstract beauty and food for thought, but nothing that ever pulled any of it together. The story never felt it had anything to it beyond people getting to understand each other, and the timing for the introduction of plot elements simply made no sense. Like how, in the very last episode, Touko’s mother suddenly interjects that she used to have visions as a teen as well. Uh huh.

    In a way, I suppose you could say that despite the quasi-supernatural elements, this was one of the more realistic shows this season. The characters acted, reacted, and developed like real people. And, like real life, there was no real story behind it and events happen randomly and just because.

    Corin
    Reply

  14. I had high expectations for the show, but in the end it only had eye candy. I like slice of life but this was just boring. If there was some kind of idea behind it, I didn’t get it. It’s a pity. 🙁

    Pega
    Reply

  16. Here’s to some of my friends who, up till now, say that Glasslip is a very nice show with very good romance and slice-of-life: “Either you watched while sleeping or you’re just delusional.”

    No offense, I don’t think it’s the worst show ever. But I really hope that in RC’s Best of 2014 blog, they’d put Glasslip as the Most Disappointing Show this year, and it really knows how to do an ‘Illusion Breaker’ on my expectations back before it aired.

    Red HeartGold ZX
    Reply

  17. So here is what I summary in this entire series is……Kakeru came to this town just to test out his amazing power of fragment or whatever, But he ended up didn’t know what he was doing. So he just screw it and move book it….

    Random
    Reply

  18. I’ve got to admit that I didn’t really understand the purpose of this anime at all but there was something about the series that made me watch every episode. I think the atmosphere of the series in general pulls you in, picturesque backgrounds included. Like… I’d love to live in a town like that.
    But plot-wise and characterw-wise it was a “wtf”.

    Kanade
    Reply

  19. What is this I don’t even…

    This would be the second “flop” since RDG for PA Works now in a long time. And even RDG was at least easy to understand, it was merely boring.

    But this, I have no idea what the writers were thinking when conceiving this series, apart from it being a cheap excuse to promote tourism to Fukui City where this series is based. If I were a resident of Fukui City, I certainly wouldn’t be pleased to have my town associated with a befuddling series. “Fukui? Oh the town where that silly PA Works series was based in.”

    echykr
    Reply

  21. It’s ended? This was the ending? Ugh…so much things unresolved…David is gone with his mom or not? What about the hallucinating things Touko’s mom was talking about? And Yanagi and Yuki? This need another season or at least 24 episodes like other P.A. Works shows. Anyway, the show was cute, even if it’s strange. ^_^

    Mario
    Reply

  22. Let me just say that this show is deep I think it’s beyond me to understand it. I mean what is going on?! What was the experiment? Why is it a success? For the love of God what is going on?

    KF
    Reply

  23. What an ending. Where’s the closure? The first few episodes made us have some expectations before we got shot down by the latter part of the series. PA should really have made this a two-cour series. One thing I liked was the character design and the animation, though I don’t quite get the storyline.

    Yuuki
    Reply

  25. I just….I don’t really know what I watched. I was just so bored by the end that I literally zoned out watching this episode. Watching this show week after week just made me more annoyed as it went on. Like the first half (up till episode 6, I wanna say) wasn’t bad, just slow. But then we jumped the rails into crazy town and I just threw up my hands.

    But pretty P.A. Works art just doesn’t save this show. AT ALL.

    P.S. The chickens were the best part. 😛

    platinum
    Reply

  28. So basically this show didn’t surpass Hanasaku no Iroha or the Tanuki anime. It sounds like it couldn’t even beat Nagi no Asakura. I dropped this around episode 3, but I wanted to see how it ended. Didn’t want to have to go through the bullshit buildup that usually happens in PA Works stuff.

    If I were to do a ranking, Hanasaku no Iroha will always be number 1 with the Tanuki anime right on it’s tail, everything else is irrelevant because nobody likes 3rd or 4th place lol.

    magoiichi
    Reply

  30. Wow. That was horrible. Brutally awful.

    I’ve seen bad anime. But that was the worst. THE WORST.

    “Yeah, I used to have hallucinations like that when I was your age. Turns out they didn’t mean anything.”

    Then why the HELL did PA even make this show???? GIVE ME MY 5 HOURS BACK!!!

    This makes Akikan look like high art. The round cabbage in Yoake Mae cries foul. And every bad Warring States period gender-bender T&A remake shakes their collective heads (and other shaking bits) at this nonsense.

    Now excuse me, while I go pound my head on the desk until the pain goes away.

    *sigh*

    s_w
    Reply

  32. … So was I the only one who got was going on and actually thought it was decent? Don’t hate, don’t hate if u don’t understand, its like a bunch of church ppl calling scientists witches. Its quite simple when you look at it. Its a sifi, but its not set up as one (if that makes any sense). Both the “weirdos” could see the future, but it was not their future they were seeing, it was different time llins/at universes. This was made clear in ep 12 (atleast for me). That sums it up, add some chickens and teen drama and u got “Glasslip” – Kavlen

    Kavlen
    Reply

    1. I don’t think the analogy works in this case since that’s a whole different matter between religion and science and I don’t think people dislike the show just because it was hard to understand. Many of the viewers have made interpretations on what was the purpose of everything that happened in the anime but the main problem I believe is that it was too vague and went into too many directions such as the interconnecting love relationships, the clairvoyant powers, and even Kakeru’s mentality, that there was no clear indication what was the intention for this show; though the comedic bits were enjoyable, it felt like it was trying too hard to be something more than it was thought to be, thus it was difficult to comprehend and was too ambitious with its ideas.

      Dualash
      Reply

    2. I think the point many of us are having is…what is the point of all those teen drama bit and chicken and those…illusion. Everything is there, but at the end no purpose could be recognised, which makes this show a pretty waste of time.

      Yes, to sum up, “just why?”

      Reika
      Reply

    3. No, we got it, it’s just that the show explicitly denied that theory in ep 13, when Touka’s mom just blows it all off. “Oh yeah, I used to see stuff like that too when I was your age. I grew out of it.”

      The whole plot/reason for the series just gets blown off in that one line. There’s your explanation: kids sometimes see stuff. But it’s cool. It’s not the future or anything. It’s just “stuff” that has no meaning. Well, maybe it has meaning, but who cares?

      So that deeper meaning? Gone. Poof. There is none, because whatever was built up, got torn down by sloppy writing.

      I can think of a dozen ways to handle this kind of plot that would be more interesting to watch than this. And that’s part of the source of my frustration with this show.

      — What if Touka’s visions start coming true? What if they’re avoidable? What if they aren’t?
      — What if the others start having visions? And they’re different? Or the same?
      — What if no one believes her? What if they only pretend to believe her, and she picks up on it?
      — What if she’s just crazy?
      — What if she can’t tell the difference between visions and reality anymore?
      — What if she’s the product of someone else’s visions?
      — What if Kakeru was never real?
      — (As others mentioned) What if they were all really chickens in the schoolyard?
      — What if she was a chicken that had been attacked by a cat, and was dreaming she was the girl who was always drawing her as she was dying?
      — Am I a man dreaming I’m a chicken, dreaming I’m a man?

      So many interesting places to go, and I didn’t even try. (I just BSed for 3 minutes there.)

      Therefore I posit that neither did the people writing this show.

      Therefore, I want my 5 hours back.

      Q.E.D.

      s_w
      Reply

  33. For a studio with PA’s Pedigree this show was just disappointing to say the least. The plot points never really seemed to tie into one another much less all the mysteries behind the “fragments of the future” which largely remain mysteries.

    The story telling for me was all over the place and while at times you think you finally grasp what they are trying to drive at, the next episode comes and like the proverbial flood washes away what shakey foundations in the sand the previous somewhat making sense episode has laid.

    At the end of the day, as a viewer who is an avid PA works fan, I am just left staring at the screen wondering what the heck I just watched. It’s disappointing but I guess a Studio which has consistently churned out quality work will have to hit a miss every now and then. And for me that is what this show was. Hopefully the do a better job next season.

    Juan
    Reply

  34. This show was all over the place. I wanted to enjoy it, I really do… However, in the end, it wasn’t a cohesive story with strong characters. The premise was nice, but that’s about it. =/

    Derpymon
    Reply

  36. I enjoyed this episode. Would I watch this show again, no. Trying to dig deeper would only be speculation, and I think that’s what they’re trying to do. Not sure it worked out well.

    I’ve been wondering about Touko’s short hair in the opening for more than half of the entire run and nothing happened. No hair cut and nothing significant happened in the past too. Don’t remember seeing her with short hair other than in the opening.

    theirs
    Reply

  39. As someone that enjoyed watching the show, I find it funny that there’s a clear majority of viewers that prefer the chickens to the MCs. This is not for everyone, I admit that if I had watched this a few years ago, I would have called it awful and disappointing. But for some reason it really
    Worked for me and I enjoyed the ride.

    ClementIV
    Reply

  40. Ughh .. This Is NOT Okay.
    I Don’t Even Understand Anything!
    I Just Liked Yanagi (VERY MUCH) And I Want Her To End Up With Yuki!
    Touko And Kakeru Should End Up Together As Well .. And He Should STAY & Not LEAVE!
    They Should Explain About Those “Fragments Of The Future” & The “Sudden, Expected Loneliness”!
    I Liked Touko’s & Kakeru’s Parents.
    I Also Liked Toukou’s Sister : Hina.
    Sacchan & Hiro Are Cute Together & Hiro’s Sister Was Nice Too.
    But NO! My Explanation .. I Need My Explanation *Cries* ;-;

    Ayani
    Reply

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