"The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi" will definitely go down in anime history for good reasons. I do mean it. No other creators of anime series would be daring enough to even attempt such, how should I describe it – despicable – action. The infamous “Endless Eight” is one of them, having repeating the story of an episode eight times with different animations and scenes. It is, I believe, meticulously hard to animate and is a waste of resources for the animators, and it is also painstakingly a waste of time for us viewers to watch those episodes. Only people who are mad would watch those eight episodes, and those who buy the DVD are even crazier. The “Endless Eight” did not go down well with me, truthfully speaking. I hated it for the world. But I had still watched it, for the sake of completing the series. The outcome: I turned from a devotee of Haruhi to someone who detested the series. I had used to think of Haruhi as God, but after those episodes, I had even decided to stop downloading the series and not again watch them anymore, just like what I did to Tsubasa Chronicle. (I had stopped watching Tsubasa at around episode 40+, even though I have all the episodes on my computer.)It was only last week that I had decided to give Haruhi another chance. I had started to download the remaining episodes (i.e. season 2’s episodes 12 to 14) and had just managed to finish watching them all just now. The remaining episodes were great and were on par with the first season. In fact, they were much better in terms of my expectations, storytelling wise, despite the fact that they had stretched the story of the novel of “The Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya” into five whole episodes. Such stretching would usually end up spoiling the story as unnecessary stuffs would end up in the show. But here, that is definitely not the case. The anime creators took everything seriously and even managed to stir up the atmosphere with various BGMs and scenes. I have personally read the novel of “The Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya” which I had bought in Singapore in 2006 and I definitely feel the difference of reading the novel and watching the anime. The anime’s much more livelier with Kyon’s emotion and thoughts which were stronger in his narration in the anime. The conflicts between the characters (i.e. time travellers and ESPers, and their different theories on Haruhi) can also be felt more strappingly in the anime.This, at least, made watching the anime worthwhile, for someone who has read the novel.
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