DESCRIPTION

CAST

NOVEL DramaGOSICK
MANGA MysteryGosick

REVIEWS

• 

  lamialuv

  97/100
  Gosick: A Romance Anime that is the Pinnacle of Historical Fiction Anime

  As a kid I spent a lot of time reading Sherlock Holmes. I am a HUGE fan of mystery in general. I am also a huge fan of romance, drama, history and everything foreign. So taking this all into account, this anime immediately caught my attention. This anime takes place in an alternate universe, but I believe it was inspired by architecture near the Swiss and French border. I am honestly a diehard fan of Gosick, my review may seem biased but I genuinely believe this is one of the best anime ever created (I also score things rather high). There is a lot to decompress about this series because, a lot happens over the course of 24 episodes so I will try my best to summarize it.

  (spoilers ahead)

  Summary: (you don't have to read this, scroll down for my scores)
  In what seems to be inspired by pre WWI, a Japanese exchange student Named Kujo comes to Sauville to attend an Academy where many horror stories and tales unfold. He meets a beautiful doll-like girl name Victorique, who is indeed a tsundere but she is a tsundere done correctly, as it is rare you see a tsundere character created, and developed so well. She is extremely smart, and basically through events the two of them solve some mysteries together. They first get stuck on some type of murder mystery ship, and they solve the mystery together and get closer through certain events. The next mystery is a biker getting their head chopped off mysteriously, and Kujo is blamed for the murder. Through events Victorique clears his name and points towards the real culprit (much like in Sherlock Holmes stories). Shortly after, Kujo meets a girl named Avril, and he suspects there is something ominous about her. He asks Victorique to find him a book, (she's a heavy bookworm). Then Kujo is knocked out and mysteriously disappears, while Victorique learns that Avril is actually the daughter of a legendary thief, but is an imposter and the real Avril is being hidden somewhere. After this mystery is solved we go into a character background arc for Victorique. The two go to a small, ancient village named Horovitz, also called village of the Grey Wolves. Victorique goes there to clear her mother's name, who was falsely accused for murder and ostracized from the village for it. This arc is probably the most important arc, because through this mystery Victorique uncovers the murderer in the village, and this murderer escapes and sets the village ablaze. Because there is one exit from the village, Kujo finds himself trapped and must protect Victorique with his life on the line. In the Murder Mystery ship arc, a similar thing happened. Through these events Victorique and Kujo start getting closer and begin to fall in love with each other from this point on. The next arc is a short one, as Victorique falls ill, and Kujo goes into town and attempts to solve a case to help the police. He ends up having to go to Victorique to get help, when he discovers she has already mostly solved it. The next arc is about Victorique reading a book about an Alchemist's tower, and decides to solve the mystery about it. When she goes to the tower, she meets a man named Brian, an acquaintance of Victorique's mother, and he warns Kujo that he should be careful of her father. In the next episode, Victorique's father takes her to a convent in Lithuania and locks her into a room there. Kujo, the almighty hero, of course comes to rescue her with the help of Victorique's mother. Victorique's father then demands that Kujo return Victorique to him, but Kujo refuses and the two barely escape from her father's clutches. The next arc Kujo is away in a nearby town to the school, but Victorique is abducted by her father to solve the greatest mystery of the country. Kujo tries to rescue her and fails, so he helps to solve the case instead. Victorique was not able to solve the case, and is sent back to her tower in the school campus. Shortly after, Kujo is taken out of the country as the king demanded all foreign citizens to be removed. Kujo escapes back, and goes back to rescue Victorique, just to find himself hostage by Victorique's father and is used as a pawn to get Victorique to do what he wants. Kujo then got deported, and Victorique was held in an underground prison. Victorique is one day going to be used by her father to show his power in Sauville for political gain, and her mother switches places with her and exposes Victorique's father's crimes to Sauville. Brian Roscoe then kills the father, and Brian's twin escapes with Victorique and attempts to kill her, but falls off a cliff instead. Then when the war ends, Kujo returns safely to Victorique and they get married happily ever after if you've read a little bit of the light novel

  Now for my scores:
  Characters- 10
  Honestly the character designs are actually breathtaking, Victorique's long flowing dresses and the tailored men's suits of the 1920s are very appeasing to the eyes. The characters themselves have plenty of depth. The two main characters are Kujo and Victorique and their characters are just done so amazingly. There are plenty of side characters too, and they are usually involved in cases and their actions are flawlessly explained and everything makes perfect sense by the end of each arc.

  Story- 9.5
  IT'S LIKE SHERLOCK HOLMES MEETS TORADORA, or something like that. If you cannot understand the story then you must've missed something, because Victorique explains everything very clearly and concisely. If you like romance, this might take you a bit to warm up to, because it takes about 7-10 episodes for the romance to really start showing. If you like mystery, well there's plenty of it. The romance is not overdone, and it doesn't take away from the main story. The reason i give it a 9.5 is because, I don't think a lot of it was explained in a simple manner, it could take a bit of thinking to understand the plot but it is something you get used to.

  Animation/art- 10
  People look at animation for the characters usually, but for Gosick I must say everything in the background is what makes it so amazing. I have never seen Europe portrayed so well in an anime it's seriously something special. Also don't forget about the details put into each of the characters' clothes, it's amazingly done.

  Music/OP/ED- 9
  The music is pretty good, not my thing but the OP and ED are really well done. They don't spoil much of any of the plot and are super cute

  All in all, I believe Gosick is a genre defining and a genuinely beautiful piece of art. You must watch until the end, as the series only just gets better episode by episode. 97/100

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• 

  PushPin

  45/100
  Fixing our daddy issues through master/servant play

  Kujo’s a simp, Victorica needs cps, Cordelia needs more screen time, and Grevil can kiss my ass. Language ahead.

  May I first start by saying that Gosick is not bad.
  However, Gosick does suffer from is these “discrepancies,” which is the best term I can think of, where shit just kinda doesn’t really make sense, or things happen for no reason. Very small, but very frequent discrepancies that all together really kept me from enjoying this show to its fullest.

  Set in a small European country pre-WWII, we are introduced to Kazuya Kujo, a transfer student from Japan who is immediately given the reputation of “the Springtime Reaper” (I’m gonna get into the ghost stories later). Because he has no friends, for pretty much no fucking reason, Professor Cecile advises him to learn more about ghost stories so he can have something to talk about with his peers. So he goes to the library.

  Before I continue with episode 1, I have to say that from here is where these “discrepancies” begin and start to confuse me, and therefore affect my entire enjoyment of the show. First impressions really matter, so if episode 1 is kinda bad, how am I gonna know if I’ll enjoy the rest of it? Episode 1 confused me so much that I rewatched it just to make sure I wasn’t judging too hard, and it was still so weird to me.

  So Kujo is flipping through this book and foreshadows some mysteries they’re gonna “solve” later in the show. He then proceeds to pick up a strand of hair off the floor, so, of course, my immediate thought is, “Why is he picking up hair from the dirty ass ground?” As I read the episode synopsis it says he “picked it up from the book” but it literally looks like he reaches for the ground, there's no way I can see that as him reaching from the book. He looks up, sees something shiny, and proceeds to run up the stairs like his life depends on it. And mind you, this library is like, fucking 50 stories high, and he’s running up the stairs just because he’s sees something shiny. He gets up there and we see Victorique (Victorica), which he mistakes for a doll, and she goes all “I was expecting you” and shit. And despite the fact that she doesn’t say literally anything scary, he proceeds to run back down the stairs like she threatened to cut off his balls. It’s the weirdest first interaction I’ve ever fucking seen and it makes no sense to me.

  They meet again later and pretty much become acquainted like really quickly. So much so that by the end of the episode they’re all already going on a weekend trip together.

  I think you understand what I mean by “small discrepancies.” Like I said, first impressions matter, and the first episode flowed so weirdly for me it really affected how I viewed the show. I even opened up the first chapter of the manga and their first meeting is so different and makes so much more sense than this.

  The show continues on as such: Kujo and Victorique are introduced to a mystery that is often related to an urban legend. Victorica easily solves these mysteries, which often lead to an even bigger mystery. They experience more events while collecting “clues” before ultimately “solving” everything.

  I would say the mysteries themselves are lacking. While we are given clues, these mainly protein to who the culprit might be, and not the what/why of the actual mystery. Everything from the why and how is usually completely explained by either Victorica or the culprit themselves. Like in Episode 5, by then there’s enough clues to know that Avril is suspicious and probably the true murderer, but there is no indication that she’s this phantom thief and is trying to find something until Victorica says it herself. Information like knowing more about Avril’s family before the fake showed up would have hinted to a motivation. I feel like there’s a lot of mystery-solving that the viewer is left out of because of Victoria's “fountain of knowledge,” which really takes away from enjoying its mystery aspect to the fullest. We aren’t given good clues on what happened and the motivations, and this ultimately left me confused about what was happening for most parts of the mysteries. It’s like the characters had more knowledge of what was going on than the viewer and the story fails to help us catch up. At a point, I gave up trying to catch clues or evidence and just waited to be told. The first mystery was probably the best delivered/put together of them all.

  With this, I’m gonna go more into the characters. Like I said before, Kujo and Victorica become acquainted very quickly and are already in each other's business by the second episode. It was kind of weird of me how fast they fell into this master/servant “friendship,” and while you could chalk it up to just their compatibility, I feel like a lot of progressions that would have made it feel more natural for them to interact with each other was left out and they just went straight into the solving mysteries together aspect.

  Other than Victoria's father the character I disliked the most was her brother, Grevil. I'm honestly questioning whether we were supposed to like him as a character. He is introduced as someone with his own eccentricities and antics, but that's never shown in a charming or endearing way. We are told he cares about Victoria as a sister, but we never really see that. He never does anything for her and only comes to her when he needs something. His whole career is literally dependent on Victoria's existence and he doesn’t even thank her. Later we find out that he’s been completely complacent in his father’s abuse of her, doing his “first son” duty of supporting his father. He never really does anything to really her until the very end. But we’re supposed to be happy he decides to leave her alone and gets his own little mini closure at the end? No.

  Now onto the ghost stories which I have a different problem with. The ghost stories vary in how they directly affect the people and the world. Some are just vaguely representative (like Springtime Reaper and the Gray Wolves), some are urban legends that are “fake” but they still have to deal with (Levithian and the Cannibal Department Store) and then some actually really fucking affect their world (Monstre Charmant). And it's this last one that really bothers me. Spoilers for the last arc:
  In the final arc, Victorica, for some reason, is seen as the actual Monstre Charmant and people use this as a reason to become rabbits and stand for some civil uprising that seems to come out of basically nowhere. This gives Victoria's father a reason to take her in order to control these people and further push Saubure to join the upcoming World War II. It’s weird because we are never shown Victorica getting such a representation, or how this uprising even came to be, so for all of these random strangers to basically rally behind her makes no sense. Victorica hardly leaves the school grounds, let alone the library tower as it is. So for the ghost story to manifest its way like this in real life doesn’t make sense and doesn’t follow the previous trend of ghost stories

  By the second half of the story, maybe around episode 16, I was enjoying the events a little bit more. Kujo and Victoria's relationship made more sense to me and the stakes started to have a bigger impact. However, it still suffered from a lot of “discrepancies” that ultimately fumbled my enjoyment. Spoiler: Shit like Brian fucking Roscoe being revealed to be a twin and therefore further undermining and confusing me about his backstory and relation to Cordelia is what I’m talking about Even small things in a dialogue where someone would ask a question and they proceeded to not answer that question provided further confusion. By the end, while I was glad they had a happy ending, I was honestly just over it.

  I can probably chalk up these discrepancies to mistakes in adapting the series form the light novel/manga, but an anime adaption should be able to stand on its own and not completely rely on an audience that is familiar with the source material,

  Overall I feel like Gosick failed on the impact it was trying to bring. The first half feels like a chore to get through, and while the latter half is arguably better, wasn’t enough to give this anything over a 50. And if I never hear Kujo screaming Victorica's name ever again, it would be too soon.

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• 

  ThyMrMan

  50/100
  Half decent first cour, falls apart into a mess in the second. Not much of a romance or mystery honestly.

  Just a warning, this review will contain some SPOILERS for the show. Warnings have been had.

  So you have 24 episodes to adapt 9 volumes of light novel to a well rounded and enjoyable anime, sounds like a great plan. You have plenty of time to build up your characters and story and lead us into an amazing ending that was, hopefully, developed in the light novel source material. And yet somehow, Gosick continues in the long trend of adaptions that manage to do almost everything wrong. And leave me confused as to how we got to the ending we did. This was a decent start of the journey, and than it quickly fell apart just after the second cour started.

  But lets look at the characters real quick. Generic is probably the best description for these characters. They are not amazing, but I normally enjoyed them and never actually hated them. Victorique is your pretty standard tsundere, but never going too far over the top, and has an ability to quickly solve any mystery presented to her. The side kick is Kujou, who is by far the most generic, his entire role is to guide Victorique to the next mystery and provide her with a love interest. I can’t say I remember him ever doing anything memorable over all these episodes. As expected we also get a full cast of side characters, from brothers to teachers to mysterious figures in the past. Some like Grevil hold important parts pushing different parts of the story ahead, if not being rather interesting themselves. But others like Avril, serve no real point expect to produce a minor conflict between the main cast members.

  But who is here for the characters, what about this story. 24 episodes to work with, gotta be good right. And it is a real mixed bag here. The first cour is decent generic mystery stuff, without much actual mystery though. This isn’t a show that you will be pausing to write down clues and figure out whodunit, they honestly don’t give you anything to work with and just have Victorique figure it out like magic and leave it at that. And that alone is annoying, not really a mystery if I never even had the possibility to solve it.

  Than we have the turning point, when I feel it all went down hill quickly. Gone is the fun mystery episodes, now we are getting overarching stories and characters. Trying to put together this complex backstory for characters and prophecies. Mixed in is this question of magic or science, which camp these new mysteries fall into and what is possible. And than that all falls apart. It ends super sudden, and they realize they need to get a certain ending. So off to the rushed ending camp we are, now we are a war show. No longer are Victorique and Kujou hanging out and solving mysteries, or helping each other out. Now Victorique is stuck in some confusing land of prophecy and family conflict, while Kujou is literally shipped to his home country to fight in war. Now this is so far from what I was kinda enjoying, and well into the land of what happened.

  These events in the second cour and ending of the show, would have been fine with me if they were properly introduced. Slowly over the first cour seeing news reports and characters talking about a possible war. Talking about the various political happenings back home. Receiving letters of concern or worry, letting the characters know of events outside of the school and local town. But it was not, none of this was built up at all, it just happens. No explanation or warning, no developments. Just now we have magic and prophecies and war.

  Some things that are good still, or at least decent. The OP and ED and various musical bits throughout the show are good. I didn’t love any of them, but they fit the show well and never stood out or distracted. And visually it looks fine, probably looks slightly better than most shows of the era.

  In general, this was a massive disappointment, and I don’t understand why things ended the way they did.

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