Bakemonogatari

 

I began watching Bakemonogatari because I read there were lots of Japanese mythology into it. There is, but the presentation of the material is rather hectic. Maybe in the novels those stories have a better passing. Here, a lot of it is told, not shown. It's a dialogue heavy show and the dialogue is entirely on this very Japanese wit style 当意即妙, with lots of retorts being a pun over Kanji radicals or how two words sound similar. If you don't know Japanese and you're not interested in the Japanese language, then it's likely you'll be missing out on half this anime has to offer.

The characters are very self-conscious about being anime characters and I'm still undecided if that's an thing I like or not. Lots of meta jokes about it and lots of playing around with anime and manga cliches. It's sort of hard to get into some of this characters but if you manage to stick around I'm sure you'll like most of them by the end. Animation is also rather different. Lots of collage and sorta hidden written jokes everywhere. The mythology in Bakemonogatari is intimately connected with language, so again, if you really want to enjoy this, knowing some Japanese will really help you appreciate things that are completely lost in translation.

Plot development is not linear and character development is not always connected to the actual plot. You know more about them because they talk to each other about lots of things, not just what is actually going on in that particular episode. Once I realized that's how the whole thing was going to play through, I learned to curb myself and enjoy the talking.Other than that there's lots of fan service, but it's so forced that's even more ridiculous than it usually is. 

So, Bakemonogatari is about this highschool student, Araragi Koyomi, that goes around helping other students that for some reason or another are cursed. Sometimes it's a clueless god, sometimes it's a demon, other times it's just stress. He'll help anyone in need and that all of the people he helps are cute girls is purely just a coincidence. The show itself is, of course, very aware of such fact and it's also a running gag throughout.

There's a lot of quirky things in this show and I feel it by reading the MAL reviews, it's a sort of love or hate thing but for me it ended up being a little bit more balanced than that. I enjoyed the mythmaking and some of the endless dialogues but it did feel too quirky at times. Hard to really explain. I think you'll just to check this out for yourself.