I remember it well, three or so weeks into the Summer anime season and thinking that Grand Blue Dreaming would end up being my anime of the season, if not of the year. I'm kind of nostalgic about those days, there was so much hope for these new shows and everything was shiny and interesting. So what happened? What made me lose interest or, if not losing my interest, what made me start to sour on Grand Blue? I think the answer has a few parts, most of them pretty subjective so bear with me as we go through them here.

Getting started with the groundwork of any anime, Grand Blue's visuals are certainly solid for a comedy. Notice I said visuals and not animation, which certainly isn't anything to write home about in Grand Blue, as it's as simple as the come animation-wise. Aesthetically speaking, however, Grand Blue just pops off the screen with its bright colors, making the ocean scenes radiate beauty and excitement and keeping the air of youth and joy even when we're not on the ocean. I usually talk about sound design and such too, but I'm going to just mention the fantastic opening, because the rest of the sound design is just somewhat run of the mill, nothing standing out which is a good thing for Grand Blue.

Favorite Character: Azusa Hamaoka

I have to admit, I was a total Chisa fanboy at first, but then Azusa just stole my heart as the show went on, mostly due to her being a non-frustrating character. It's one of the reasons I soured a little bit on Grand Blue, characters just being frustrating at times. The only ones who really managed to avoid this pitfall were Azusa and Kouhei. Even Iori managed to frustrate me in certain episodes with his talent to always make the scummiest decision possible. Maybe I'm missing the point of Grand Blue with its scummy character interactions, but to me, I just don't like that kind of interaction, especially when it happens all the time. It gets rather tiring when the characters always end up trying to stab each other in the back in new ways with every episode.

My issues with Grand Blue mostly boil down to the same things, which, in my opinion, plague the comedy genre in general. Those things would be the tiredness of the tropes involved. In anime, rarely do you get a fresh comedy and even Grand Blue doesn't really hit that target. Sometimes, it has a really fresh comedy scene, but I found quickly that I was watching for the more serious scenes, like when Nanaka took Iori to the aquarium. Those scenes were just magical to me, far outstripping many of the comedy scenes. I understand that I shouldn't be looking for those moments in a comedy, especially one of Grand Blue's reputation, but somehow, I just couldn't help it, I just really connected to the gangs friendships.

That leads me into my next point, which is that there's no progress to the characters for the vast majority of the show's relationships. You see Iori and Chisa's relationship progress and Iori's and Kohei's friendship grow deeper, but it doesn't really happen anywhere else. Maybe you could say that Aina and Chisa's friendship, but that's not really focused on at all, they're just kind of friends all of the sudden. Again, maybe I'm wrong looking for this kind of thing in Grand Blue, but why is it wrong to be looking for development?

Though I've been harping on it, Grand Blue Dreaming is legitimately a good show. It just didn't live up to my early hype for it. It got bogged down somewhere in the middle with its one-shot episodes with Iori's scum squad friends, which are easily the worst episodes in the series. And, even though it has its lows, you can almost always find at least one or two jokes that make you laugh out loud every episode, which is quite the feat for a comedy, in my opinion. Grand Blue falls prey to the same issues that most comedies end up falling into and that would be repetitiveness in its material. In Grand Blue's case, it's the absurd drinking jokes, which are funny at times, but sometimes its nice to have a break from the monotony. Obviously, this all boils down to my personal grievances with Grand Blue and why it dropped down my Summer season rankings quite a bit, but nonetheless, Grand Blue remains a great slapstick comedy.