Gosick

 

It feels like Gosick tries to have everything in there somewhere. This is a 24 episodes long and for half of it it manages to keep its pace. There's a lot to know about the country of Sauville, in particular the Saint Marguerite academy, an elite school that our leads Kujo Kazuya, a Japanese student, and Victorique, the daughter of a cultist (yes there's a lot going on here) attend. Well, Kujo does attend, Victorique is a prisoner there because of her family's involvement in Sauville's political life. She also happens to be a little genius girl with beyond human mistery solving powers. And a pipe that she never actually lights it.

There's also colorful and interesting side characters populating Sauville. Grevil, the police investigator and Cecile, a teacher at the academy are my favorites and always welcome when they show up. Despite having a lot of things to solve, the story here has a tendency to forget about itself. A lot. Many episodes are self-contained tales  but many of them are not particularly interesting, though a couple are really good. Kujo and Victorique go around solving misteries out and about, though the mysteries here are not the type that invites the viewers to solve it. We just get to see Victorique putting random things together that happens to be right because she's the main character. That's her on the cover of course. 

The characters are interesting enough and you do care for them but not even that can conceal the fact that the plot here is spread too thin. That's the biggest fault of Gosick. This would be very good if it had half the episodes so Kujo wouldn't need to go screaming for Victorique up and down for so long. It does get exhausting at certain point. Then the last two episodes come in and solve everything very, very fast and ads a 10 years gap on top of it on its way out. Because it's one of those. There's a good story and good character development here somewhere. This anime is based on a visual novel, maybe it's worth checking that out instead.