Daijoubu

I don’t know what your otaku fetish is, but if you like nekomimi,
there’s one in Yozakura Quartet!

Yozakura Quartet 01 - I want my 24:29 worth of time back. bad on a level hitherto unknown. makes Rental Magica look good. do not bother.
~Owen S on Twitter

I have the first two volumes of the Yozakura Quartet manga lying around (part of MyMaBa, meaning “My Massive Backlog“), so I read the first chapter and then looked at the first anime episode. These kinds of comparisons can be instructive. Generally an anime adaptation tends to make things a whole lot clearer than the manga. The drawing style of a lot of manga is actually pretty confusing, with a lot of cuts from one thing to another and bits of action condensed into one panel. This is particularly true at the start of a series, when you don’t know any of the characters or their abilities. You are also probably not used to the artist’s style yet, so some of the characters can tend to look the same until you get used to them! Actually, this is not the case with all manga, but these thoughts occurred to me in reading Yozakura Quartet, so let’s just say the art is average, hehe.

Turning to the anime was a vast improvement. While following the basic outline of the first manga chapter’s plot, the animators have greatly expanded it. Most notably, there’s a lot more basic background information, so viewers get more of an understanding of what this world and these characters are all about. This includes revealing, or at least hinting at, some character relationships and powers which will only be touched on in the manga in later chapters. The most notable change is the attention the anime gives to the character Rin, who enters the town as a new resident and is held hostage by the gun-toting villain. In the manga, she is already settled down and is just in the background. By making her a newly arrived character and including details about her back-story up-front, the animators create more of an immediate link with the viewers and point out, right from the beginning, that tension between humans and yokai will an important aspect of the series.

Sometimes, changes can be a little strange, though. For instance: the scene where cat-eared girl screams “Satellite” and sparks fly. In the anime, she’s looking for the bad guy, but in the manga, she’s looking for a place where there aren’t civilians, so no innocent bystanders will get injured.

To say that the Yozakura Quartet anime represents a more sophisticated introduction than the manga does not answer the fundamental question: is it any good. To call it “bad on a level hitherto unknown” seems a bit extreme. The habit among anime bloggers experiencing a new series is to react explosively, and sometimes negatively, in a very theatrical way. The truth is that you really can’t form too much of an opinion about what an anime will be like based on one, or even several, episodes. First episodes seek to grab the audience with a heightened level of excitement, often risking an overload of action or humor which can turn off more jaded fans. I found the first episode of YQ entertaining. Unsurprisingly, it has similarities to other shows in the same genre, but I see some potential. Perhaps things like Soul Eater have raised the bar for fans expecting their action to have a funky style, wild pace, extreme humor and oddball characters, but the more straightforward YQ can be enjoyable in its own way. And let’s face it, most shows start with these weekly villains; the question is, how good will the larger plot be? It takes time for that to develop, and I’m willing to give Yozakura Quartet a chance.