Oh, It’s This- Summer Pockets — First Impressions

I went into Summer Pockets completely blind with only the vague idea that it would be some sort of slice of moe series. It was when I saw this girl that I knew I was wrong and it was actually a Key visual novel adaptation.

There’s just soemthing so Key about a brooding, mysterious white haired girl that I didn’t even need the magical disappearing butterfly that led the brown haired dull looking protagonist to see her to know. The Key house style is stronk and immediately recognisable. The rest of the episode too was a feast of recognition as it played out exactly how you’d expect a first episode of a new Key adaptation to do. You got the ordinary looking high school or maybe college age boy moving to a small island for the Summer to help his aunt sort through his grandmothers heritage, who clearly has some sort of Tragic Past that makes shlepping to the boonies attractive to him. Once there he meets a variety of girls who will surely become important later as he tours the island. Nothing important happens but some hints being dropped for future follow-up and a lot of banter between him and some of the girls.

It all felt incredibly nostalgic and this screenshot from the ending is a good example that made me immediately think of Little Busters for example. Series like Kanon, , Little Busters and especially Angel Beats were very important to me when I got into anime seriously again about a decade ago. Kanon helped me deal with grief, Angel Beats was the first anime I was really obsessed with. All of this is why I liked this first episode so much, because it hit me dead right in the nostalgia centre, actual quality concerns be damned. The ANN reviewers may not have liked it much, but for me this was perfect.