Haruhi Suzumiya is one of the biggest wastes of potential in anime. The visuals are great, the characters are awesome, the music is perfect - everything except the main plot of Haruhi having crazy god powers is amazing, really, but that core plot gets in the way and detracts far more often than it enhances the series. We played The Promise of Haruhi Suzumiya for PSP for today's Eric Vs. 365 game, but really it was just an excuse to talk about the series. Read on for more and to watch.
I love the first season of Haruhi Suzumiya. Everything about the production is just about perfect. The core story is a little "ehh", but I love the characters and world and music and it's just freaking great. It was one of the first 5 series I watched when I started getting back into anime back in 2010 - after not watching any of it for 8-9 years - and maybe that's why it impressed me so much. It was just a "Wow! Anime has really come a long way" type of feeling. I watched Love Hina and Tenchi Muyo and Evangelion and Trigun (mostly Toonami stuff ... blech) before, so going from that to Haruhi and Beck and K-On and was a big change.
Even though I'm critical of the core plot - Haruhi having god powers gets in the way of the fun, plus I hate Koizumi - I still think the first season of Haruhi is one of the best single seasons of anime ever. Then they ruined it all in the terrible Season 2. The movie is fine, but it didn't need to be almost 3 hours long. The best part about the movie is that it introduced the alternate universe where Haruhi is a normal girl, which brought us the Nagato Yuki-chan anime side series that is freaking awesome.
You can tell that the core plot didn't have anywhere to go since they haven't made any new main line Haruhi stuff in forever. They wrote themselves into a corner and can't figure out how to fix it. That's fine by me, though. Just keep making the alternate universe stuff and forget about Haruhi's pointless powers.
Today's game, The Promise of Haruhi Suzumiya, is a fairly typical visual novel / dating sim. It was Japan exclusive, but wonderful folks on the Internet have translated it to English and put out a patched version of the ROM, so it isn't hard to play if you're actually interested in it. I didn't play much, but I did do something the characters should have done from the start - I told Haruhi the truth. She didn't believe it, of course.
