Older Children (May contain mild bad language, bloodless violence)
Vintage:
July 9, 2013
Status:
Still Airing
Summary:
When a friend asks Natsuki what high school club she's going to join, she cheerfully responds "the go-home club" (meaning, she's not going to join any of them). However, she soon realizes that this club actually exists at her high school, and she's just expressed interest in joining it! Before she knows it, she ends up as one of the two new members of "the go-home club," which is a small group of eccentric school girls. One of the girls likes fighting bears, while another is ridiculously rich. But what exactly constitutes the activities of "the go-home club"?
Chronicles of the Going Home Club isn't exactly surprising for me. I may only have seen the first two episodes so far, yet I would have expected more from this start-off.
Comedies have always run on dialogue rather than on story. So far, there have been a couple really good punch lines in the dialogue, yet more often than not, it has been meandering along with few surprises. The characters' individual quirks, where entertaining enough, cannot hold up the entire dialogue; also, I am missing realism or character depth, though it might be too early to judge that. The animation is awkwardly stiff at times as well, yet the art, where ordinary, looks good enough.
Having said all that, Chronicles of the Going Home Club does its job, and it doesn't do it too badly. Its strength lies in one-off jokes, game references, and cute girls doing things everywhere on the scale between cute and off-puttingly weird. Nevertheless, I have watched anime of similar setup that I personally found to be far better; quirkier, more surprising, with at least slightly less expected characters; most prominently in mind right now would be e.g. last season's Yuyushiki. So far, I did enjoy Chronicles enough not to just shut off the screen in the midst of one or look for the clock every four minutes; however, it's not particularly new or surprising to me, and the punch lines are just a bit too far in-between. In my honest opinion, cutting the episodes to half their length, thus cutting a lot of expected dialogue, would have done the entertainment factor wonders. ;)
I'm pretty sure Chronicles of the Going Home Club can be enjoyable if you like the setup and you don't set your expectations particularly high. I however had these expectations, and this anime simply fails them for quite a bit of ordinary-ness.
5/10 from me.
