Contains some spoilers and the opening paragraph is all one 11-line sentence, a long sentence by me, no surprise there.)[]
It's been a disappointing 2 albeit not yet complete years both personally (though that's nothing new when you have depression, live in a working class town and your parents were abusers who were themselves abused) and anime wise; almost every bad or mediocre anime I've ever seen, regardless of what year they were released, have been viewed by me in 2012 or 2013 while literally only about 2 good anime that I hadn't seen before have been watched by me in these 2 years and Boku Wa Tomodachi Ga Sukunai was one of them so naturally I was happy that there was a sequel but it seems to me that every franchise jumps the shark eventually and I fear that Haganai (the other name for BWTGS) might have done it already.[]
I really don't know apart from maybe more money why they bothered to make NEXT. We don't learn very much apart from Maria is only a nun in training (though they let her wear the habit and in one episode she had to go away for some nun-related duties) and the episodes aren't all that amusing. A sign of the decreased quality is the fact that Yozora and Sena are even more sexualised in NEXT, gone from very sexualised (which if I could tolerate their personalities I would have liked, thinking and doing are 2 very different things after all) to ridiculously sexualised bordering on pornography. At one point you can very nearly see Sena's panties though I for one would much rather see her butt... thrown out of the programme for being such a snob and obsessing over her mortal enemy Yozora who isn't any better though this happening seems as likely as Kobato being herself (whatever that is) and not some carbon copy of a TV character or Kodaka (about the only tolerable character) saying what he feels already. The opening theme also isn't as good though the ending theme is slightly better and far more touching. The ending also isn't all that great. The other members arrive at the club to discover that Sena (whose hair is unfortuantely never long anymore) has gone on a journey by herself to think about stuff. Why it happened and so suddenly or where on Earth she's going are beyond me so this ending can only work if there's a sequel because as it stands it's one of the worst endings I've ever seen.[]
