I have now finished watching Kannagi. I thought it was terrific. The first two episodes were amazing—these episodes basically focused only on Nagi and Jin. After the first two episodes the show took a different structure, since it introduced quite a few more characters, and the show ended up being a funny slice of life story around these characters—oh, I don't want to forget to mention that the characters in Kannagi are fantastic, which is regardless of the fact that each of them fits an anime archetype. The subsequent episodes are just as fantastic as the first two, but with less seriousness. The show ends up coming back to the seriousness near the last two episodes of the show, so it turns out to be a nice overall format. I thought this was another perfect ending; especially those last couple scenes—hilarious!
Speaking of humor, the humor in this show is great; the show had me laughing multiple times per episode. I was surprised of how many puns there were. The only other pun I vividly remember is from Clannad, but instead of being natural like the puns in Kannagi, the pun in Clannad had to be explained through a subtitle note. Also, Nagi's ridiculous laugh that she makes after using a pun really pushes things over the top.
The subtitles were fantastic. As far as I could tell the English was perfect. Thank god there are people who can actually fully grasp the English language. However, I did have one problem, but this is no fault against the subtitles. Some of the dialog in Kannagi happens at lightning speed; there are even times when two people are talking at the same time. I sometimes had trouble keeping up with what was being said, but this is not the show's fault—comprehending fast speech through subtitles is inherently difficult, so neither the show or the subtitles are at fault.
One more thing: the video quality of Kannagi is amazing! Absolutely stunning! There are fourteen episodes spread across two discs. That's two hours and forty five minutes of Kannagi per disc; and that's not even considering the text-less opening/closing and previews. I don't know how they fit seven episodes on one disc while completely destroying the video quality of DVDs that only have three episodes per disc. The company that did the DVD authoring is Nightjar, LLC. I don't know what kind of sorcery they used to achieve such fidelity, but hopefully any other shows they author in the future turn out this superb. I am still in complete amazement; who would have known that one of the best looking DVDs I own is the one with seven episodes per disc—simply astonishing.
So yeah, Kannagi
ing rocks!