Ranma ½ (1989)

Pros:
Ranma 1/2 hooks the watcher at the start with an interesting premise. That being martial arts and fantastical elements like curses. Mixing both these elements results in a lot of unique and interesting situations. Throughout the first 18 episodes of the show, it slowly expands the cast of characters and before you know it, you're attached to almost all of the characters. This works in the show's favour as a lot of the episodes are about interactions between various characters and placing them in unique circumstances. Each character has clear motivations and quirks that are set up when they're introduced. These are used for great comedic effect throughout the show and result in a generally funny show, that got a chuckle out of me quite often. My favourite character relationship is Ranma's and Akane's and the emotional scenes they do have are always nice to see. (I'll get back to this later.)

The OST is also stellar. This goes for the background music during the episodes, where the emotional tracks shine but more so for the openings and endings. My favourites are Little Date, Where Do We Go From Here?, Mutual Love is Complex and Equal Romance. Mutual Love is Complex gets extra credit for being a great opening for the final OVA episode. I felt that it encapsulated the show as a whole well, although the same goes for Where Do We Go From Here, which is used for the English Dub.

Neutral:
Ranma 1/2 at its nature is an episodic show, even more so than the manga it's adapting. It is nearly 50% filler anime-exclusive episodes. This would be a death sentence for most adaptations, but due to the show's episodic nature, the filler episodes blend in well with the episodes drawn from the manga. You wouldn't be able to tell if you didn't already know beforehand. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, because there are a lot of great filler episodes that surpass their manga counterparts. My favourite would be episode 49 "Am I Pretty? Ranma's Declaration of Womanhood".

Cons:
There are disadvantages to an episodic format, which do hurt the show, especially near the end. Because of the episodic format, episodes always need to return to the status quo near the end. Sometimes it is reasonable enough, but for others, it is baffling and annoying. This wouldn't be as bad if there were more status quo changes within the show after the last main cast member,

Spoiler, click to viewclick to hide

Ukyo

gets introduced in

Spoiler, click to viewclick to hide

episode 41

. However, past that there are only two major ones and even those are just introducing new characters instead of changing any existing dynamics. The only real development that occurs throughout the entire show is Ranma's and Akane's budding romance. Even that statement is dubious because there is very little development in the filler episodes. The ending of an episode would have you believe that Ranma and Akane have grown closer only to negate that development at the last second by having them have another argument and essentially resetting them to square one. The reason why I say that there is any development is because, near the end of the show, it suddenly seems that they are a lot closer than they should be. This is likely because they adapted those scenes from the manga, which I've heard has a much more natural progression due to not being hindered by any filler. The problems of the episodic format and the lack of resolution that results from it, really come to a head in the finale of the show.

The finale is frankly terrible. It doesn't provide a resolution to the story in the slightest. It doesn't resolve any plot threads and creates new ones by

Spoiler, click to viewclick to hide

introducing a new character, Nodoka.

The only hint that the final episode is the last one is one scene at the very end with a vague goodbye to the audience. The worst part is that they knew that the series was ending and yet took zero steps to provide a satisfying ending. If it got cancelled and they didn't see it coming, then that at the very least would be understandable. The entire last episode is spent

Spoiler, click to viewclick to hide

dancing around whether Ranma will reveal his male half to his mother

but it doesn't end up happening. Now this would be a pretty interesting plot dynamic, where

Spoiler, click to viewclick to hide

Ranma has to pretend to be a girl whenever Nodoka's around.

The problem is that it's worthless since it's the last episode of the series. You don't set up a plot thread that could get paid off later when there are no other episodes left. It's like they ripped the story arc straight from the manga without realizing that this was their last episode, while the manga still had 16 volumes to go! It's not like a halfway decent ending would've been impossible. The last episode could've

Spoiler, click to viewclick to hide

revealed the curse to Nodoka, had her accept Ranma, reunite with Genma

and ended on an emotional but positive note. To make the ending even better,

Spoiler, click to viewclick to hide

in episode 158, Ryoga could've found out that Akane doesn't love him and grow from that.

There's no point in upholding the status quo, when there are only 3 other episodes afterwards in the series. Why not set up the ending a bit with some actual changes?

The only reason I could see them for not providing a more definitive ending is because they wanted to keep it open for the OVAs. Except those could easily just have taken place before the ending chronologically. The only OVA that wouldn't be possible due to this change would be the 3rd one, but that OVA is the worst one and didn't even do anything interesting with the plot dynamic that

Spoiler, click to viewclick to hide

Nodoka

set up.

This ending rant may have come off as overly negative and left you with the impression that I dislike the show. However, it is only because I like the show and its cast of characters that the ending was so disappointing. I was hoping for a better resolution. Especially after seeing how the second movie managed to pull it off.