Quick Final Thoughts – Sakura Quest

I have my thoughts together much better here than I did for Re:Creators, which is good, because I’m sure my opinion here won’t be as widely shared.

I may have a soft spot for shows set in the countryside, but Sakura Quest more than earns praise from me. It’s a quiet, slow-burning experience that keeps things light-hearted, but is far, far more than the sum of its parts. The town of Manoyama is wonderfully realized, as are its people, reluctant to trust outsiders and apathetic to their town’s decline out of fear of losing their culture, and in depicting them, Sakura Quest shows a surprising and very welcome amount of ambition that more than justifies its double-cour runtime with pacing so smooth you won’t notice it, while throwing subplot after subplot into the air and managing to catch every one of them, and capping off with a finale that is both suitably madcap and endearingly sappy, and that brings me to the root of why I loved this show.

It’s not often that you see a show so well-executed, so grounded, and so polished, that also has absolute bucketfuls of heart, and as anyone following me knows, that’s something that will always be important to me.

10/10. Total dark horse, and more people should be talking about it.