Isshuukan Friends is about a girl named Kaori that loses all memories of her friends at the end of every week. Yuki decides to become friends with Kaori despite her not wanting to become friends because she will not remember him. Yuki helps her to regain memories and gets her to keep a diary to help her to know what she has done with her friends. It is all going well until one of Kaori’s old friends shows up and calls her a traitor. At that point her whole memory resets and Yuki has to start all over again. Hajime gets some of Kaori’s old friends to talk about what happened to Kaori. This leads to Yuki being afraid that he could hurt Kaori and make her condition worse. Yuki decides to distance himself from her which only makes her sad.
This egg eating scene is surprisingly very important.
Isshuukan Friends is so slow. The majority of the show is about Yuki helping Kaori to make friends. This happens so slowly that it feels like nothing is happening in most of the episodes. They could have sped most of the series along and finished in half the time. Then after this glacial pace there is an information dump of what happened to her in the past which would have been better to know at the beginning of the show. If the show had started with a flashback to that information it would have given the viewer more sympathy and insight into Kaori which is needed to get through the plodding pace of the show. The way it is now I could not help wondering why she did not try some ways to remember people before and just wall herself away from everyone.
The artstyle of the show is distracting. All of the characters have little flyaway pieces of hair. It does not sound like much, but they keep drawing my eye to them. In a genre where the hair is generally outlined and filled in having a random colored piece outside is something noticeable. It is especially bad on the males where the pieces of hair are often longer than the hair beside it. This would not have been such a big problem for Isshuukan Friends if the show were not quite so boring.
The ending for Isshuukan Friends does not make much sense. Yuki worries that he will hurt Kaori like she was hurt when she was younger and make her condition worse. Yuki’s example is that Hajime hurt her by accident and it made her worse. Hajime was not even really the thing that made her worse so much as remembering what caused her problem to begin with. Yuki has never bullied her, so he is most likely in the clear. Also the things that made her like this were from when she was much younger. She is probably more resilient by now. Finally he should have known that having her first friend distance himself would hurt her.
Overall there is no redeeming quality for this show. The characters are pretty flat, the story is pretty nonexistent for most of the show, and the art is a distraction.
Score: 1/5
Watching this made me want to cry as well from boredom.
