Kantai Collection Mid-Season Impression

Kantai Collection have reached 6 episodes and it is time for my mid-season impression of this series. Oh and as a warning, this post will contain spoilers.

The anime started off pretty good with entertaining action scenes although the CG quality does leave a lot to be desired. They have set up this balanced tone of the show where there are serious aspects of it combined with some funny scenes and the usual moe stuff.

On episode 3 we get this darker mood in which a character was killed in action. This makes a lot of people think that the show is going to get serious and will feature more naval combat and even more character will die in later episodes.

That prediction however, was wrong. The show chose to go the Slice of Life route where we see the girls doing funny stuff in various situations. Now I am not one of the viewers who expects the show to be grimdark and serious with tons of character deaths so I am actually okay with the Slice of Life route they are taking here.

However, I do admit that the show doesn't seem to know what it wants to be. It seems that the director just made a list of stuff that Kancolle players might've wanted and just decided to put all of them in the anime regardless of whether it made sense or not. The difference in tone in episode 3 and some of episode 4 is quite jarring when compared to the rest of the show and while it didn't make the show horrible for me it does disappoint quite a lot of fans.

Quite a lot of the jokes in Kancolle are also in-jokes that most likely will not be understood by those who never played the game. This either make people interested to play the game(like I did) or it might just annoy people and make them dislike the show even more.

What do I personally think of Kancolle? I think it is a fun show to watch but it definitely is no Girls und Panzer nor will it ever come close to Girls und Panzer. Kancolle was made primarily to make people interested in trying the browser game and to entertain players of the game with various in-jokes and in-game references.

If you plan to watch kancolle expecting something like Aoki Hagane no Arpeggio: Ars Nova or Girls und Panzer, you will definitely come out feeling disappointed. Watch it for a Slice of Life anime experience featuring ship-girls and you will probably get to enjoy it more. As it is right now, I believe it will stay as a Slice of Life show until the end of the season. Fun show for sure, but disappointing to see that it could've been something more but decided not to.

What do you think of the show so far? did you enjoy it? who's your favorite character? leave a comment below.

This picture of Kongou was added by my friend's request