I have to admit that so far, I’m not having the best luck with my seasonal picks. AMAIM is probably the top contender right now and I’m relatively neutral on it. I had things to complain about in the first episode. My hopes for The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window are slowly dwindling. But that happens sometimes. It just makes me appreciate the off-season anime I’m binging that much more!
Even though I may have just given away how this post is going to go, please do give it a read. It’s short!
Fact is if this was a straightforward romance, i.e. if the sexy components weren’t very thinly veiled, I would probably have given up on The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window. It’s just not my type of story. Turns out, Hiyakawa is not only tragically bad with boundaries and consent but he’s also the possessive type. The kind of possessive that if your friend starts dating a person like that you start looking in the newspaper to make sure they haven’t been murdered. Basically, Hiyakawa is kind of a garbage character. Which is ok if the narrative takes that into consideration.
Maybe because Hiyakawa is blonde and a bit slimy and the story has all these connotations about psychics, I wrote down in my notes that he’s basically Reigen from Mob Psycho but without any of the charm. That’s a bit of a problem, Reigen really isn’t much without his charm.
Besides that though, the episode introduced us to two other spiritually gifted people and I liked them both. Well, we only see Erika for a second but I was intrigued. Keita mostly serves as a foil for Hiyakawa (and potential rival I guess) but I like his character design and I wish the story was about him instead.
The episode wasn’t a complete waste for me. I’m 4 years old so I do laugh at jokes like his spirit is all loose and stretched out… And there was a lot in there. But honestly in this episode, whenever the two leads shared the screen I thought it was a low point. And that does not bode well. I also wish they would have picked up from the soft cliffhanger of the ghost behind the bookcase instead of just forgetting about it. I really liked that scene and wanted to know more.
Besides that, the structure f the episode was a bit messy. It essentially jumped from act to act without too much connective tissue. Each act could have been a filler episode on its own but they all included a bit of exposition which I suspect will be important in the future. I just wasn’t crazy about the presentation. I’m not sure if the manga this is based from was originally a doujin or a webcomic but that’s what I’m getting from the structure. Short isolated arcs that probably correspond to individual chapters. This sort of unconnected effect when you string them all together often comes about as a result of serial publication.
Oh yeah, and we got to see the OP for the first time. I liked it!
At episode 2 I stand pretty much where I was at episode 1. I guess when you take them as a whole I got similar experiences from them. Except that I liked the end of episode 1 leaving me with a general more positive feeling whereas I particularly disliked the last act of this episode. Let’s see what ep 3 does…
