The Pet Girl of Sakurasou is an anime that creates this deep sense of nostalgia for your highschool (or college) years, when you were living together with all your friends, getting into trouble and ridiculous situations, and going through emotional struggles. And even if none of these things ever happened to you, Sakurasou does a good job at eliciting these emotions once the show gets moving.

#Plot (8/10)
I liked the plot of Sakurasou and don’t have any major issues with it, nor did I see any major flaws. I think the general high school coming of age/bringing a group of friends together is not super unique anymore, but this is an anime from 2012.

The part of the plot that did interest me, was the idea of depicting how prodigies stack up against “regular” people. I think it makes more sense to talk about this in the characters section though, so I’ll speak more on this later.

#World/Setting (7.7/10)
Generally pretty basic being a school-based anime and all, but I did like that most of it took place in the shared dorm. Plenty of school anime only show the classrooms and occasionally the walk home, so this was a nice change of pace.

#Characters (8.5/10)
So as a comedy/drama, I think the characters are the most important part of this genre, and Sakura-sou does a great job building a diverse cast of characters and showing the diverse set of problems that comes along with them.

As a main character, I initially wasn’t quite sold on Sorata. His motivation as a character to “get out of Sakura-sou” seemed pretty weak at best. It wasn’t until I got further into the show that I realized this was on purpose, and that his character development was based on the idea that he went from going through the motions and being a “normie” to accepting that he may be different than others, and making good friends because of it. His relationship with the rest of the cast was interesting and diverse from person to person.

Mashiro specifically was a character type I don’t think I’ve seen before. Based on my own opinion, and from what I’ve briefly read online, Mashiro is High-Functioning Autistic. It isn’t something difficult to figure out, but is interesting because of how rare it seems to be in anime. I’ve known a couple people with autism in my life, and after watching 600+ anime (according to Anilist), I cannot recall a single anime that clearly focused on an autistic character. I’m not claiming to have watched everything, but it definitely caught my eye. However, I think the author did an excellent job not just portraying how Mashiro views the world somewhat differently, but also how those around her changed how they see her over time. I remember thinking very early on “Why does everyone think they have a say in Shiina's life? Obviously she requires assistance with things, but she can still be independent.” One of the biggest examples of this was Rita repeatedly asking Sorata whether he’ll send Shiina back to England or not. I don’t really agree with the decision to even give Sorata a choice in the matter, but it seems live over the course of 25 episodes, the cast realized that Shiina does have the ability to make her own decisions.

The rest of the cast had interesting parallels (namely Jin and Misaki) to the “genius vs. normie” trope in order to carry the theme throughout. Overall I think most of the characters were interesting and well written, and their interactions were entertaining as well.

#Visuals (7.7/10)
Visuals were good, slightly above average, but not as good as some other anime from the same time period.

#Audio (7.5/10)
Nothing really stood out, average.

#Enjoyment (7.8/10)
Overall, I’m glad I finally got around to watching this. This show is solidly in the “above average” category for me and was worth the watch. It’s possible I would have maybe enjoyed it more had I watched it 10 years ago before some of these themes had been done many times over, but Sakura-sou is an entertaining comedy with a solid amount of drama that kept me interested.