NOTE: If you want to watch this series make sure you've either watched the anime and/or read the original visual novel for Kanon, Air, Clannad, Little Busters, Rewrite, and Angel Beats Or at the very least, make sure you're OK with spoilers from any of them. The first episode alone specifically has the most spoilery scenes from each of those 5 series.

This review is for BOTH season 1 and 2.

Kaginado at its core is a parody comedy series. It takes characters from 7 different series: Kanon, Air, Planetarian, Clannad, Little Busters, Rewrite and Angel Beats, and puts them in the same school while making lots of jokes and callouts to the character personalities and development.

I quite like the overall presentation of the show. It uses a chibi style that works well with the characters' designs and the overall goofy parody nature of the show. Every major characters from the above mentioned series get at least 1 speaking part, and most of them get their original Japanese VA back (minus a few who had VAs pass away since their anime or VN).

The idea of getting characters from different series interacting with each other was a nice treat. Whether it was the Marine Life Alliance of Fuuko, Ayu, and Shizuru, the main protagonists having a secret meeting with bags over their heads, secondary heroines bonding over "losing" to the main heroine of the series, or many heroines interacting at a school swimming pool. I quite enjoyed seeing the interactions of characters who would otherwise never interact.

Unfortunately Kaginado has 3 major flaws for me:

1) The overall length of the series. Each episode is only 3-ish minutes each. With this many characters to cover, many only get maybe 1-3 lines at most. And with 12 episodes per season, it seems like a gigantic waste and unfairly balanced. A few characters appear in almost every episode like Sunohara or Shizuru while characters like Komari get 3 speaking lines in only 1 late episode despite being one of the more popular and important heroines of Little Busters (Season 2 kinda fixed this when she became one of the characters who was salty lost to the main heroine)

2) This one is up for debate but I thought the parody comedy was... hit or miss. If you watched Carnival Phantasm, a parody of Tsukihime and Fate/Stay Night, I'd say the comedy style is similar to that. Some jokes were funny and clever, but others... I just thought were very cringe. Basically a lot of the humor was exaggerating parts of characters' personality or story to use for comedic purposes. That can be good in theory, but many times in this show, it was maybe... too exaggerated? It had that anime parody style of characters YELLING THEIR JOKES. I don't know how else to explain it.

3) Modern KEY series past Rewrite/Angel Beats are not referenced at all. Kaginado is supposed to be a celebration of KEY's main works, with its parody jokes and whatnot. However, only the main series mentioned above get any speaking lines. If you were hoping for major appearances from Charlotte, Harmonia, Summer Pockets, or The Day I Became God, you're SoL. It's possible we may get a season 3 with these series, but I thought the fact these series weren't even directly referenced at all was a big waste.

In conclusion, Kaginado is a tough one to recommend. You have to be a pre-existing KEY fan of all their earlier works, you have to be OK with a parody comedy style that exaggerates character personalities, and you have to be OK with a series that essentially adds up to just a little under 40 minutes total. If these criteria are fine with you, definitely at least give it a try. If not, I'd check out something else.