I didn’t like how the Suicide Island part of the NHK ni Youkoso anime seemed to drag on, particularly the epilogue in ep. 14 (I haven’t watched past that episode yet!), but I was surprised at how differently it was handled in the manga (I don’t know how it’s handled in the light novel). The anime seems to unnecessarily expand a concise and straightforward idea into a bloated and wearisome sequence. It also makes Satou come off as much more pathetic than he already is in the manga. Instead of having him deal with things on his own and having a few panels where Misaki is reassured by Yamazaki that Satou would never kill himself, they had to have Misaki and Yamazki and the fiance guy (I didn’t see him in the manga yet!) go out to the island for an over-the-top melodramatic scene. Sometimes something more understated is better. The manga version just seems much more coherent to me than the anime.
I remember when I saw Satou, …um, taking something before his hallucinatory episode in vol. 1 (not in the anime, iirc), I thought that the manga would be a bit different (better probably) than the anime, but here they’re adding something, and with the usual rule of anime filler (i.e. it’s bad). I wonder why they did it the way they did–to fill more episodes? Or did they feel the original story was somehow not clear enough in dealing with what is, after all, a major problem in Japan? Anyway, checking out the manga makes me want to finish watching this show.
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After reading the first two volumes of the manga and after having seen the entire anime series, I prefer the anime version. The characters seem to respond better to one another in the anime than the manga. The suicide island arc went by too fast in the manga for such a serious issue.
The manga is good stuff, have you seen the scanlates? They’re up till the 8th book so far, you should take a look if you haven’t already. Haven’t seen the anime yet though.
Yeah, I thought the island episodes were the weakest part of the anime: over the top, in a way that didn’t really mesh with the rest of the series. The manga handled that story arc better, keeping things compact and more realistic, but it still seemed a bit out of place (Satou on a desert island… the heck?). Maybe the artists just wanted an excuse to draw Kashiwa-sempai in a bikini ^_^
@Foshi: There is an advantage in a longer anime series to develop elements in a manga that were rushed or truncated. I just felt that the anime was a little too heavy handed in that section, but I did enjoy the earlier parts.
@Owen S: My backlog is so big anyway that I’ll just stick to the American releases of them and support the industry here in the U.S.
@Matt: I know you’ve had issues with desert island story arcs before!