Genre: Fun, Fanservice, Weird
Score: Excellent
Rating: PG for mild fanservice
Kyon is growing up: he has set aside his childish ideas of aliens, time travellers and psychics. Then he meets Haruhi, a girl with an overactive Reality Distortion Field. And it seems that the aliens, time travellers and psychics are all interested in her. And some of them are really cute.
First, a warning: the episodes in this series appear to have been shuffled into a random order, but the randomness is in fact carefully chosen – listen carefully to the next-episode announcement to figure out what belongs where. The whole first episode is a very well-made imitation of a badly-made fan video, that actually belongs about 3/4 through the story. Stick with it, and it does start to make a sort of sense.
Without wishing to spoil it, the central concept of this show – something that takes a few episodes to truly emerge – is something really rather original. And it’s quite nice that the whole thing happens from the perspective of a guy who not only is normal compared to everyone else, but even when he does know what’s going on, kind of wishes he didn’t.
The fact that it’s also full of cute girls, often in bunny outfits, maid cosplay or occasionally state of undress, is just icing. My favourite moment: Kyon secretly dragging a collection of photos of Mikiru out of the Recycle Bin and into a hidden folder.