The following assumes familiarity with the reviewed material. Spoilers below.

The Bakemonogatari ("Ghostory" or "Monstory") franchise is a weird one. Equally unique within its medium as without, and really undefinable by any criteria but its own. Let's recap a bit: the Monogatari series is the story of high school student and demi-vampire Koyomi Araragi. The franchise began life as a series of short stories (and not long later, light novels) published by the utterly singular Nisio Isin, a pseudonymous novelist and enigma of a man whose prolific and unique work ranks him with mangaka Douman Seiman and musician/video game developer ZUN as some of the most instantly identifiable purveyors of peculiar Japanese pop-culture. An anime adaptation of the first of these novels--Bakemonogatari itself--was begun by SHAFT Inc. in 2009. It was immensely popular and of course a second anime--Nisemonogatari, followed.

Nisemonogatari has two narrative arcs, the longer "Karen Bee" arc with seven episodes and the shorter "Tsukihi Phoenix" arc with just four to close out the series. A lot happens within each of these but their structure itself is interesting in its own right. In both cases, the primary narrative conflicts are resolved in ways that most would deem anticlimactic. Kaiki, a conman who scams middle schoolers by selling fake spells and inflicts Araragi's older younger sister (not a typo) Karen with a pseudo-magical illness.

It takes quite a while for the arc to even get to that point, as a good amount of Nisemonogatari (and from what this reviewer has seen, this is true of the franchise in general) devotes itself not to advancing the main narrative plotline which in many shows would be solved in a single episode or two at most, but rather to what are essentially tangents. In the first two episodes of the series, the main thrust of the arc is barely touched on at all, instead the first episode begins with what is essentially a narrative feint, Araragi has been kidnapped by his girlfriend Senjougahara, but, this isn't the main plotline of the arc. Kaiki, the conman mentioned earlier, only even shows up in the third episode, and the equivalent of a rug-pull is done to the audience, with the "Senjougahara kidnaps Araragi" plotline essentially being folded into the real main plot. And that is without mentioning Araragi's visits to the homes of Nadeko and Suruga (two returning Bakemonogatari characters), which consume a good chunk of an episode apiece and serve even less overall narrative point than the kidnapping subplot. The Kaiki plot itself of course, is resolved with nothing more than an extended conversation! He is not, in any real sense, "fought". He is not defeated, and really is not made to pay for his actions at all. He leaves town, and is out of our heroes' lives. So it goes.

This may sound like a criticism but it's genuinely not. It's these strange asides that make Nisemonogatari worth watching in the first place. Other shows may do plot twists, but Nisemonogatari is completely unafraid to simply yank the existing narrative out from under the audience and swerve into a different direction entirely, for minutes or even entire episodes at a time. All of this, of course, is beautifully depicted. Nise, like its predecessor, is not traditionally animated. There are no background characters--at all--and much of the scenery is CG rendered, giving even mundane spaces a bizarre otherworldly feel. Characters' conversations are filled to the brim with rapid visual cuts--closeups of faces, shots visually depicting metaphors for and puns based on what is being said, miniature flashbacks, and more. These are, if not the most dynamic visual depictions of conversations ever animated, certainly in the running.

Of course it is impossible to talk about these asides without mentioning the other asides. Which is to say, yes, Nisemonogatari like its predecessor and like its successors, often veers straight into "fetish porn minus the sex" territory. This is, to an extent, what you sign up for, as the series is marketed as an ecchi among its many other genres (truly the franchise contains multitudes), and it is genuinely quite hard to blame anyone for avoiding the series simply because it, say, has no qualms about depicting a hundreds-of-years-old vampire with the body of a little girl bathing in the nude with Araragi as the two talk. At the same time, unlike a lot of works that pull similar tricks, Nise is more or less inseparable from these scenes. It is a part of the show's identity as much as the easier sells discussed above, and while I would not really go so far as to call these scenes defensible, I think that again, to a degree you get what you sign up for, and criticizing Nise to too heavy a degree for its strange preoccupation with fanservice almost feels disingenuous given the amount of western work that exists that juggles a similar mixture of experimentation with medium and form and, frankly, crassness. It can indeed feel a bit like explaining the appeal of gangsta rap or grindhouse films to someone who's not sold on either, and it's equally tempting to explain these scenes away as "symbolic" or decry them as unnecessary to the show's character, but I feel that both approaches are equally flawed. The fetish material exists, is present, and must be by every individual viewer, reckoned with differently.

And look at that, a paragraph apiece to the story, the visuals, and the fanservice(!), and only now do we get to the aural element. Nonetheless! The sound design in Nise remains fantastic. Both in terms of its soundtrack (the use of multiple opening themes is one of the franchise's best characteristics) and indeed its lack of it in places. The Monogatari series does more with voice acting on its own than most anime. Individual lines are doubled up, reverbed, echoed, or distorted for emphasis, sometimes to the backdrop of complete silence. Few anime show this much restraint in their sound design, and it must be applauded.

So what to make of Nisemonogatari? Well, it lacks the emotional heights of Bakemonogatari itself, so it is perhaps not an improvement, but it's a refinement of the formula, and anyone who liked what Bake had to offer will find more of it here. To neophytes, start at the franchise's beginning with Bake, but make this your second stop.