A lot of us were confused when we saw Horimiya getting a new season. Hadn't it already concluded? Horimiya rose to immense popularity and it left fans looking for more, especially manga readers who were infuriated by the fact the adaptation only received 12 episodes when it could have easily gotten 24 plus. As a standalone season, the original Horimiya was honestly a great watch if we exclude the fact that they cut out a bunch of chapters. It honestly felt very seamless, probably because they focused specifically on Hori and Miyamura outside of the extensive side cast. That's where Missing Pieces comes in. It shines light on the side cast, which I always thought was the strength of Horimiya, but glaring weaknesses are present.

I feel that some of the more casual Horimiya fans will be disappointed by this series. The diehards will love to see their series animated no matter what, but those who enjoyed Horimiya as a romance will be disappointed. I think that you would be very hard-pressed to call Missing Pieces a romance. It's almost exclusively slice-of-life, with comparatively little Hori and Miyamura in comparison. On the romance topic, I want to express one of my criticisms of the series. Nothing happens. Yoshikawa, Ishikawa, Sakura, and Iura, these guys are stuck in an eternal love polygon. There are so many advances, especially with Sakura in the main series but nothing ever happens outside of Remi and Sengoku and Hori/Miyamura. One of my absolute favorite moments in the original series was the exchanges between Sengoku and Remi exchanging books that they thought the other would like. The author chose to keep everything static and while all the characters are constantly frolicking about, laughing and smiling. By no means does it feel satisfying. Missing Pieces is adapting chapters that were skipped, and some of those chapters are from earlier in the series, and it just kinda hurts to see Sakura laughing around Ishikawa when we know that she has feelings for him. When the chapter was originally drawn, we weren't supposed to know about her feelings so it doesn't feel natural. It was moments like this that made me feel like missing pieces was just a cash grab, too little too late.

Knowing that this is a chill slice-of-life primarily, it changes how I would go about recommending it. As mentioned previously, I like Horimiya's side cast, I think the characters are generally really likable. It keeps a good balance of alternating in and out of the school setting. I think the comedy is flat and euphoric though. When characters try to be funny, the voice actors are doing too much and the jokes are often overused, boring, flat, and stale (except the one teacher who likes high schoolers who was funny [I don't condone this], I wish he would have gotten together with the female teacher). I have a problem with the disposition of the characters, they all seem overly happy all the time. To put this in context, you know how guilty people who are bad at lying act overly agreeable and crack jokes a lot? That's how I felt about the cast sometimes. I personally like most of the characters (Remi, Sengoku, Ishikawa, Yoshikawa, Sakura, Iura) even if I don't like Hori and Miyamura that much, which made this for a generally enjoyable watch despite being boring and cringe at times.
Final Score: 7/10. Thanks for reading, -nashy