haize78

Tegami Bachi is worth a watch. My mark for now is provisional as the final one hinges on the second series, which I haven't yet started watching; after I watch Tegami Bachi Reverse, I'll come back and update this review. I finished this first season last night and I was quite satisfied with it, but as I started thinking about what to write in a review more and more flaws kept presenting themselves to my mind. Basically, this anime has an intriguing setting which is visualized through lovely animation, designs and colours, and a good main story - the drawback is that after a compelling beginning which really draws you in, it's just random slice of life and filler episodes that don't even contribute much to the character development. The main story kicks back in around episode 21, but that's far too late. This awful pacing is really a pity because if the anime creators had stuck to the main story and invested more in character development, it would have been a memorable anime.

Tegami Bachi is set in Amberground, a mysterious twilight world illuminated only by the weak rays of an artificial sun - the farther you are from it, the less light you get. This is reflected in the class system and political organization of this world: Akatsuki, the capital city, is located directly under the artificial sun and it is the home to the privileged people, the farther you get from the sun the more destitute and poor are the people and the land. People are not allowed to move to other territories as there are extremely severe restrictions to travel, so once you are born in the lower classes it's virtually impossible to improve your social standing and all you can look forward to is a life of hardship and privation in a perpetually dark world. The protagonist of our story is a young 8-year old boy, Lag Seeing, whom we find in the first episode chained to a post and crying for his mother. Lag turns out to have a postal address stamped on his arm, he is a letter which is to be delivered by a Letter Bee, a post man, to his aunt in Campbell. Lag's mother apparently was kidnapped and taken to the capital - but we don't know by who or for what reason. The Letter Bee who is assigned the task to deliver Lag is Gauche Suede. During the trip, a relationship starts to develop between Lag and Gauche, with Lag looking up to Gauche. By the time the delivery has been completed, Lag has decided he wants to become a Letter Bee just like Gauche, and just like Gauche he wants to aim to become Head Bee and thus gain access to the capital to look for his mother. The story then jumps forward 3 years and we see Lag setting off to do the exam to become a Letter Bee. He expects to find Gauche at the Letter Bee headquarters - the Beehive - but he finds out that Gauche never managed to become Head Bee and has instead disappeared. After Lag passes the exam and becomes a Bee himself, this story is set aside as we follow Lag in his deliveries. These episodes are sadly for the most part just filler, we do meet the other Letter Bees, but there is pitifully little character development. As mentioned before, at episode 21 the story gets back on track and Lag finally finds some clues as to Gauche's whereabouts. Obviously as soon as it was starting to become intriguing again, the first season ends. Another thing that could have been developed more is the shindam and spirit amber thing. There are giant armored monsters called Gaichuu living in the desert areas between towns, these monsters are attracted to human emotions and hearts - so also to the letters the Letter Bees are carrying as they contain the hearts of the people who wrote them. It is part of a Letter Bee's job to defeat Gaichuu and they do so by using a shindam, a kind of special gun whose bullets are shot using shards of heart - if you shoot too much you end up using too much of your heart; this concept is interesting but isn't really developed much in the first series. And there's also the completely unexplained fact that Lag has a piece of spirit amber in his eye. I also felt that a too-convenient and over-used plot device was the fact that Lag's shindam allows him - and anyone else that happens to be around - to see (exactly like at the movies) the heart of the person or object shot - which is an excessively easy and handy way to wrap things up. It's as if they couldn't bother to write up proper endings but decided to take a short-cut instead. Kind of cheap in my opinion.

The characters are ok. The designs are good and the character building is done well. But there is essentially no character development. Lag - and all the other characters - start out with some distinctive features and they retain them. They don't change. Lag is unfortunately a hopeless crybaby, in each and every episode he will end up crying and wailing - it does get annoying. In general, all of the characters are good, but - I can't stress this enough - none of them undergo development. And they all have great names: Largo Lloyd, Aria Link, Lag Seeing, Gauche Suede, Jiggy Pepper, Mock Sullivan, Connor Kluff, Zazie Winters...

Animation and sound and voice-acting are all really good. 

Overall, it's worth a watch. It slightly annoyed me that the anime creators tend to manipulate the viewers emotions with all the crying and resorting to cheap tricks like Lag's ability to expose people's hearts. And there are many loose strings that I hope will be addressed in the second series.

***

I finally finished Tegami Bachi Reverse and am here to update the review. First things first, I had initially rated this anime 5.8 after having only watched the first season for the reasons stated above - mainly for all the filler. Tegami Bachi Reverse is much better as it stays nearly always on track, there's little filler so my rating has consequently gone up. At the end of the first season, I was asking myself: just what could make Gauche abandon Sylvette and his job as a letter bee? And I was hoping it wouldn't be a convenient memory loss... Anyway, the ending is satisfactory, even though some issues (like Lag's mother, the amber spirit in his eye and Lag's real nature) are not addressed. And, believe it or not, Lag cries a bit less - which is a relief.