To watch The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan, it is imperative that expectations be set. Whether a viewer will like it or not depends largely on this. If you expect a Haruhi S3 OR you like how the characters are written in S1 and S2, you will be disappointed. If you want to explore a certain path branch not taken in The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya movie, you will like (or at least appreciate) this one.
Before I proceed, let’s tackle the show’s weak points first.
One: The KyoAni visual finish is not present, simply because the studio animating it is not KyoAni. To Satelight’s credit, they did not seek to imitate the KyoAni style and do their own thing. That sort of worked in the show’s favor by painting the show as being in alt-Nagato’s perspective.
Two: The show’s latter episodes feel indecisive and appears to finish in a cliffhanger, which is a shame. Being a spin-off, it was quite unlikely to get a season two to begin with. This is the decisive factor on giving this show a “Mixed Feelings” as far as recommending it to other viewers is concerned. That being said, whether you’ll like this or not is a “see for yourself” affair. For me, I enjoyed it even with its flaws.
Going to its good points…
Exploring this world shows a completely new side of the cast that we’re familiar with, stripped of supernatural occurrences (aside from nudge nudge wink wink references to Haruhi fans, which I like very much). If you’re among those who find Haruhi overbearing in the canon show, you’ll like that it was toned down a lot here. I prefer this version of Haruhi over the original. The character balance between the cast is much better here (and also was hinted in The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya).
The buildup and fluff involving Nagato and Kyon’s relationship in the slice-of-life segments is nicely paced on its own and presents the viewer a very understandable picture of what’s going on in Nagato’s head and heart, even in the more serious episodes.
To me, the highlight of this show is the soundtrack. It really elevated the show to be a compelling watch along the way with nary a miss. It manages to capture the cutesy and the introspective scenes when it’s needed. Its ED is one of those that became an instant “can’t skip” for me, and if you liked Violet Evergarden, that might intrigue you. I’ll let you find out why.
Overall, I very much enjoyed this show. I only acknowledge that The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan is not for everyone, primarily because of what one might expect. But I can at least recommend you to try the first few episodes and make your own judgments on whether to continue or not.
I really enjoyed this one too, I think it’s an essential watch for Haruhi fans, or more specifically, Nagato Yuki fans, but not really for anyone else.
yes it does finish a bit weakly and on a mild cliffhanger because, as is unfortunately common, it’s only a partial adaptation roughly covering the events from 5 volumes of a 10 volume series. so there’s a fair bit more to read if you want to continue it but they have cut out a lot of extra fluff and a bit of bloat from the manga. they did a fairly good job streamlining the manga into a 16 episode series. a full 2-cour would have been too long and drawn out, a standard 12eps would have been too short to cover both the light hearted SOL rom-com fluff and the more serious arc they adapted very well that crosses it into the main Haruhi universe.