C³

C3: the One With the Rubik’s Cube



I’ve been watching anime for quite a while now. Not counting Pokemon and Dragon Ball Z, which I watched when I was too young to know what anime was, I probably started about six years ago, give or take. In that timeframe, you can watch quite a few series. That’s why My Anime List (MAL) is such an important resource! Being able to keep a record of everything you’ve watched as well as record how you felt about a series and see it all in a list isn’t only helpful, it’s incredibly satisfying. It affects that part of your ... brain that makes you want to watch more and keep the list going. When I first started watching anime I never used MAL, nor did I know of its existence. That means that by the time I did start using it a little over two years ago, I had already racked up a good many series to register. Now, I consider myself to have a decent enough memory, I usually don’t forget all that much and when I made my MAL account, I could remember everything I had seen prior. Well, almost everything. I have a bit of a story to tell. You can imagine how years of watching anime without keeping a record, then suddenly trying to remember everything you’ve seen could be tricky. I don’t care how good your memory is, something will slip through the cracks. C3 was that for me. I couldn’t remember anything about it really and certainly not the name. All I could recall was what the main character looked like, that she had something to do with a cube and just one scene from the show. That was it. You could imagine how finding a specific anime with just that information could be difficult. And it was. I kept it in my mind for a while and kept trying to think of the name but to no avail. Then, finally, for some reason I can’t even remember, it just came to me: C3! Perhaps I had seen a character somewhere, or a video related to it, I honestly don’t know. Whatever gear started turning in my head, I typed it into MAL and sure enough, I got the right series. Ok, yes, I watched all 12 episodes. Oh, now I have to rate it? Oh, yeah! That’s pretty hard when I don’t remember anything about it. And that was the thought process that led to this moment. That was about a year ago, and as I was trying to find an anime to talk about this month I was reminded of C3 and I decided to satiate my cursed curiosity for this conundrum of a cube once and for all.



C3 (pronounced either C-Cubed, C-three, or CubeXCursedXCurious) is an action, supernatural, harem series that started as a light novel written by Hazuki Minase (a writer who has done some scriptwriting for Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya) in 2007. It ran for seventeen volumes over six years, had three volumes of manga made, and finally in 2011 made its anime debut. It was adapted by Silver Link, a studio who has done quite a few recognizable works, Baka & Test, WataMote, Chivalry of a Failed Knight, to name some, and was directed by Shin Ōnuma who directed all the things I listed above and much more. The soundtrack was composed by Jun Ichikawa who I suppose most prominently did the arrangement of the first Pokemon Diamond and Pearl OP, and as a Sinnoh fan myself, I can appreciate that. Something else that’s interesting to note is that C3 has a TV-MA rating, which not a whole lot of series has. Was I surprised when I found that out? Sort of. I kind of get why, but we’ll get to that later. Let’s find out if C3 is any good, shall we? What? I should have remembered from before so I didn’t have to watch it again? I mean, y-yes you have a point, but, uh, well...shut up! I’ll curse you!



Our story begins with a delivery man, who likely doesn’t get paid enough for his job, carrying a giant black cube to a doorstep. But this doorstep doesn’t belong to just anyone, no, it belongs to Haruaki Yachi, our high schooler protagonist. Yachi’s father who is overseas sends him weird stuff all the time, so he’s fairly desensitized to his shenanigans and throws the cube in storage. That night as Yachi is asleep, he hears strange noises coming from somewhere in the house. What dangers could it be? A murderer? A thief? A violent psychopath? No, it’s just a stark naked girl with long blue hair eating the young man’s rice crackers...and all of the other things I mentioned. Ahem! The girl’s name is Fear Kubrick and she was a “cursed tool” made during the height of the inquisitions, who after being filled with so many negative feelings of hatred, gained consciousness and took on human form. Now, along with her dark past, she comes with a curse: whoever’s her owner will be driven mad and eventually use her for torture, as they revel in their victim's pain. Our friendly neighborhood protagonist, Yachi, is unswayed by this, as he is a nice guy and has a strange immunity to all curses. Fear could never drive him mad...well, at least not from the curse anyway. He informs Fear that she could break her curse by replacing people's negative feelings of her with positive ones. Feeling deep regret for so long, she is overjoyed by this. And so Yachi and friends live their lives trying to protect the cursed cube from those who wish her harm as she gradually tries to repent for her sins and become more human and along the way, help save even more cursed tools.



Ok, so a story about a girl that’s a cube? Or is it the other way around? I can get behind that! I like both of those...things? Rubik's cubes are neat, right? Wait, she fights with one!? My first impressions of C3 overall I must say was pretty good, far better than I remembered or expected, though I didn’t remember anything in the first place. From the first episode, you’re quickly thrown into things headfirst and get a good enough understanding of what the series has to offer. That fast pace is something that stays for the whole anime, but thankfully doesn’t ever feel rushed. I was also pleasantly surprised by the uniqueness of the plot. Through Fear, we learn of this story built around cursed items that take on human form. It’s an interesting concept that can potentially lead to some interesting scenarios. It creates this story about tools growing consciousness, about tools that can’t or won’t think for themselves breaking free from their masters. Tools that won’t commit the crimes they're told to do. It’s oddly a motivational story in a lot of ways. And we see it through not only Fear but through the other cursed items as well, like Konoha Muramasa, one of Yachi’s friends. She starts to lose her grip when she sees blood, but she manages to control herself. Fear’s the same way when she hears screams. But they’re both trying to change, despite the world seeming not wanting them to. The main point in Fear’s arc is this question of if she even deserves salvation in the first place. Does a cursed tool have any right to be happy? Do they have any right to live at all?



Questions like these are at the forefront of the plot and it also gives way for some interesting motivations for villains. One the one hand, there are the villains you would expect: ones that want to destroy Fear because they see her and all cursed tools as a plague, but there’s also another type of villain, one that loves cursed tools. I thought this was especially interesting because the whole plot centers around Fear trying to break her curse and live a happy life. Yet this new villain wants more or less the same thing: to see cursed tools be happy. The goal is the same however, the difference is the means at which they accomplish that goal. While Yachi prefers to break their curses and let them live happily as humans, you have villains who wish to fulfill their curses, ones who wish for the cursed tools to stop fighting their “true selves.” Villains that actively try to make Fear and Konoha go back to their old selves. To give in. It has you questioning the characters, especially Fear. Is she really worth defending? Was she really just a tool, unable to fight the will of her master, or did she just suddenly grow a conscience? Which one is her true self? The sometimes gentle, always hot-headed, rice cracker loving human, or the quite frankly homicidal maniac? Fear struggles with these questions throughout the plot and so do you, the viewer. There’s this sense of an identity crisis. One that really every character goes through at one point or another. An example is Kirika Ueno, who although being human also suffers from being a tool to a master, and her arc is about becoming more than that and following what she herself wants and not what others tell her. However, one character is an exception to this theme and that’s Yachi. He doesn’t suffer from an identity crisis, but unfortunately, he is afflicted with “bland main character” disease. What is perhaps the exact opposite of an identity crisis, and a crippling illness to be sure. For the most part, C3 is a story about overcoming your past, regardless of whether you’re a human or not. It’s about breaking the shackles chaining you to that past and heading towards the future. I think perhaps the most fitting epitome for the story as a whole is a scene right at the end of the series. A melancholic Fear asks Yachi a question as they overlook their quiet town from the rooftop: “there are humans who act like tools and tools that act like humans, what’s the difference?” Which are the other cursed tools? Which is she? Yachi smiles and simply says, in a sentence that sums everything in the series up perfectly “a simple tool never wonders whether it’s a tool or a human.”



For as interesting and unique as I find the plot to be, it isn’t all hunky-dory. There are a few unanswered questions the anime leaves you with, mostly about the cursed tools themselves. First and most importantly just what exactly are the cursed tools? We’re never giving anything concrete about them. We don’t know how they’re made, what exactly they are, or how they even take human form in the first place. We’re left completely in the dark. From Fear, all we know is she was used during the inquisitions and had so many negative feelings funneled into her that she became sentient. We don’t know how that works, or why she can turn into a human and switch whenever she wants. We even see later on that cursed tools don’t necessarily have to choose a human form, it can even be a doll. But why, or how it works we never know. In that way, we hardly know which form is their true form. We’re also never really shown how curses work either. We know that the cursed tools are trying to break them and that positive feelings are how (which again is never explained) but we don’t really see how they work. Because Yachi is immune, it seems as if the curses aren’t really there in the first place, so they don’t really seem necessary to break. I suppose it’s so they can live without Yachi, but let’s be honest, it’s a harem series so that will never happen. Perhaps making the curses affect him in some way but have him struggle to fight it for the cursed tool's sake would have been more interesting. We do get to see a little about curses and their potential tolls from Kirika, but she isn’t a cursed tool like Fear or Konoha. So it’s hard to know just how devastating they could be.



There was another thing I was kind of surprised at, we never get any information about Konoha. Someone who has supposedly been Yachi’s close friend for a good while. We know her “trigger”: when she sees blood, but not exactly what happens if she loses herself. We can take a wild guess from Fear, but we don’t know for sure and as we’re never given a backstory, it’s hard to make assumptions. So I suppose I would have just liked to see a little more about what makes the cursed tools tick. A little about who or what they are. And maybe that is explained in the light novels. The anime only adapted a small portion of it, but in just the context of the anime, we’re left with a lot of questions about the concept the story itself is centered around. And that’s hardly ever a good thing.



Generally, C3 takes itself fairly seriously. Of course, it has some comedy along with it, but much of the plot involves themes of murder, sometimes torture, and the occasional character might get dismembered. Now, this is all true, but another true thing is C3 is a harem anime and as a result has some fan service. I’ll say this, the fanservice feels largely unnecessary, (as it usually is) with the occasional upskirt shot or innuendos here and there and sometimes quite forced boob humor as Fear (as everyone will remind you) has a flat chest. It’s nothing new for the genre, but to give C3 credit the fanservice never cancels out the serious portions of it. There’s none during fight scenes and moments where anything important happens. It’s usually just for comedy, however, how funny you find it will vary. At the very least, it isn’t overbearing, though it doesn’t need to be there at all.



I’ve been waiting to talk about this! So there’s one aspect of C3 that helps convey the story wonderfully, but I have one main qualm with it: that’s the art. The art does a lot of things right, which I’ll get to in a second, but I want to start instead, with something I didn’t like about it. I do not like the character design of C3 much at all. I’ve already talked about Yachi and how you couldn’t pick him out of a crowd if you tried, but that carries to the rest of the cast as well. Konoha is the super generic more mature looking glasses-wearing girl that we’ve seen about a hundred times and I can think of multiple examples off the top of my head. Fear’s alright but she looks like 90% of small tsundere characters in the world. Though I will say I quite like how in battle she fights with a Rubik's cube and uses all sorts of grizzly looking tools. It shows a great (and borderline humorous) duality to her cute appearance. The only character design I really find interesting (bar the villains which I think are pretty good) is Kirika, both for her actual design not looking like a million other characters, and how that design is partly a byproduct of her backstory, which is a pretty interesting one. I suppose I like Kuroe Ningyohara’s design as well as her powers, but her, uh, forceful(?) personality mixed with the questionable fanservice, and her design was a little off-putting.



However, I overall adore the artwork in C3 and think that it is one of, if not the best part of the series. Not only is it just good looking being colorful, vibrant, bubbly and just a pleasure to look at, but it also does quite a few other things well. The fight scenes and the various ways the characters can fight are well done. I mentioned before about Fear in battle, and I really do like it. From a drill, a giant sword and chain, or even a breaking wheel to an iron maiden, she has just about all the horrible punishments you don’t ever want to imagine at her disposal, and using them as she does in battle is surprisingly cool to see. Don’t worry though, no torture here. She’s beyond that now. But my reason for loving the art goes beyond that, it’s used in C3 in a way that gives it an identity. The anime is almost trippy to watch, with it cutting to different styles of character's faces or towards what the subject of conversation is. It’s sporadic in what the camera focuses on and it does this all in time with the soundtrack as well. To give my favorite example, there’s a time when what is essentially a ransom tape is being recorded and as the villain is talking this menacing music plays in the background. In time with that music, every 10 seconds or so, it will cut to a monochrome view of a clock, its hand jerking forward with a ticking sound. Not only does it signify that the video is recording, but it also adds to the severity of the situation. With everything combined it almost becomes stressful to watch. There are also other clever parts in which the art is used to convey violence but in a less violent way. For instance, when a character might receive a nasty cut, rather than show it, it flashes quickly to an all-white background as you see little red lines start to appear and drip down. It turns something that isn’t so artsy like violence and turns it into something that almost looks like an abstract painting, but is obvious enough for you to know what just happened. It’s incredibly well done and something I have never seen before. I think it’s wonderful.



As I mentioned briefly the OST is also a strong point. Not only does the soundtrack accompany the visuals well, but it also pops out. Rarely have I ever watched an anime where I immediately notice the soundtrack. Once you start hearing that a cappella track in the first episode you’ll be hooked. The OPs and EDs are quite good as well, with some very Japanese sounding tracks, along with some quite good art. Perhaps I should have mentioned this earlier, but I loved the visuals in the first opening. Fear dances gracefully to the song and looks beautiful while doing it. I think it’s funny how later in the series she tries to learn how to dance to that exact song but fails miserably. It’s a subtle but great joke. Back to the tunes, there are all sorts of tracks from super lighthearted stuff, to menacing “you know it’s about to go down” tracks. And I said it before but the a cappella was great! I never heard something like that used in an anime. I was actually hoping to see Jun (not Jim autocorrect!) Ichikawa’s other work, but it seems he still hasn’t done all that much. A shame really. However, the uniqueness of C3’s soundtrack will stand as a testament to the work he can do.



I suppose now I’ll talk about the elephant in the room: the TV-MA rating. So, do I think it deserves it? Yes, probably. Not for the fanservice, because it rarely goes past being suggestive and there’s no nudity or anything. If anything I’d say it’s because of the plot more than anything. I mean when you really get down to it, it is a story about a homicidal killer trying to repent for her sins, regardless of how deceptively adorable that killer may be. There are also quite a few scenes of graphic violence. I mentioned how it’s usually down in an artsy way, which it is, but not the whole time. I mean in one scene a character has their stomach cut open and the villain shoves their hand inside and starts squeezing. I mean the art makes it look like somebody’s just reaching into a bag to find the right color jelly bean, but I’ll tell you this, you wouldn’t want to eat those ones. And it’s not like they can do that all the time. After someone gets dismembered, you’ll still have to see a bloody stump in its place, y’know? And, I mean there is a part where someone gets violently drilled to death, clone or not, they have blood and the art can’t cover that up. Though I admit, that scene was one of the most clever and evil things I’ve ever seen a villain do, so I liked it quite a lot. Oh no, maybe the curse is getting to me? I’ll say there’s certainly worse violence but it isn’t exactly mild either. It’s more than you’ll probably see in your Naruto’s or you Dragon Ball Z’s (I suppose dismemberment happened in that quite a lot too!) or whatever the kids are watching these days. If you’re squeamish, maybe stay away. It’s up to you! It’s not my job to watch after you, youngins!



I really debated whether or not to do this. I’m generally of the mindset that I don’t watch things multiple times (especially if they aren’t great) because there are so many other things I could watch. But I made an exception for C3, purely because I’ve had a fascination with it ever since I forgot its name. I hate giving a rating for something I barely remember, so I really wanted to fix that. And because of this whole review thing It gave me a chance to, for that, I’m grateful. I really did enjoy C3 quite a lot, far more than I thought I would. A series that in my mind I would have been like “oh, yeah the cube one,” I can now go like “oh, yeah the cube one, it was pretty good.” It honestly made me want to go back and rewatch some other series that my memory is a bit foggy on. Well, that will have to wait for another time. I’d still rather add something new than something I’ve already seen. But if anything C3 showed me that it’s worth going back and experiencing something a second time. You never know how your opinions may change. Another reason I probably feel this way is because when I had watched C3, I was very early in my anime career, only having a handful of series under my belt. I wasn’t able to tell what C3 had done right, and on the flip side, what it had done wrong. But now I could. And for that, I’m grateful to it. C3, when I decide to take a look at an older series (and maybe even talk about it) I’ll owe it to you. Thank you, C3, and thank you, Fear, you adorable monster you.



As always that was just my opinion and isn’t any more or less valid than yours. If you don’t like that, Fear will curse you! Your punishment? Forced to have a Rubik’s cube glued to your hand until you solve it. Oh, the horror! As always, I highly recommend you don’t listen to me, your grandmother, your friend’s cousin, or anyone else, and instead watch C3 and form your own opinion. Forming opinions is fun and like milk keeps your bones and your body strong!



Thank you very much for reading ~


I have a strange desire to go mess with a Rubik’s cube now. Wait! I can’t believe it! I finally finished it! Well, one side that is. Funny story, I had never used a Rubik’s cube when I was younger so I assumed once you did one side that meant you completed them all. What a poor innocent idiot I was.



Anyways, I’ll see you next month!

I have stopped watching ecchi shows for the sole reason they quickly become repetitive, dumb, and forgettable quite fast. I must have watched over 200 such shows back when I was new to the medium and I hardly remember anything that was going on in them besides the main excuse for a story. Characters and sex jokes have been completely wiped clean from my mind since they kept repeating in almost the exact way in every show. And then I hear how this C3 anime is awesome! How it is the most amazing thing after sliced bread. “The second episode proves wrong all those who ... doubt its brilliance” is what the fanboys scream. And so I said “Oh, what the heck, maybe it is worth my precious attention.” It’s not like ecchi humour always auto-destroys a show; it can easily be used as a tool to further progress deep and philosophical concepts. Remember how it was an inseparate element in Furi Curi or Kuuchu Buranko? So why not; maybe this is one of those exceptions where the erotic humour is just means for far more important things. So I sit down and watch.

STORY: 4/10
Analysis: Premise 2/2, Pacing 0/2, Complexity 1/2, Plausibility 0/2, Conclusion 1/2

Episode 1: Gah, the same old crap I saw in all those throw away shows. Some meek guy suddenly finds a clueless naked chick in his house and before you know it, the girl-next-door appears and starts a cat fight for whom gets to have him. FOR WHAT REASON, HE IS A WUSS! After which fetishes each one of them represents (the flat-chested loli tsundere and the megane busty yandere), he goes to school and she goes for a walk… Hey wait a second, where did she find the clothes? She came in the house completely naked, the wuss was living all alone there and I doubt the love rival gave her some. Either the wuss is a cross dresser, a panties thief, or this show already doesn’t give a rat’s ass about plot continuity. Meh, I might as well keep watching for this amazing thing everybody was talking about. The rest of the show is about random things she does wrong because she is a dumb broad and the wuss is supposed to teach her. A dumb broad and a teenager tutor, all alone in a house. Yeah, the usual hentai excuse that never heads anywhere; I’ve seen that a million times already. Further more, she is a loli that transforms into a box. That’s right, it goes beyond the loli-in-the-box trope. The pilot episode was the same trash as always but then they say the second changes everything. Let’s see…

Episode 2: Half of it was the usual random school comedy skits I wouldn’t care less about. The other half suddenly turns to some weird fighting shounen with insane characters. And people all of a sudden transform to swords and summon guillotines out of thin air. What is this, the ecchi version of Soul Eater?

Episode 3: Cube girl is now all emo for being a weapon of mass destruction and the whole episode is spent on the meek dude looking for her and accepting her for whom she is. Yeah, very corny stuff but definitely NOT what I would expect to see in the third episode of an ecchi title. Unfortunately the ending of episode 3 turns back into a more than typical ecchi by having both the chicks to AGAIN trying to win his affection and AGAIN having fan service.

Episode 4 and onwards: So they are now trying to train their powers, while still goofing around and fending off crazy people with magic weapons. And no, I won’t bother to make further explaining to what exactly they do because it is just a slight variation of the same plot that happened above.

Each episode up to 3 had a very different feel to it, which is a good thing. The problem is these types of shows usually spend the first 2-3 episodes with good humour and a promise for an amazing continuation, only to quickly turn to wasted potential and run-of-the-mill sex jokes that head nowhere and end in the middle of nowhere. I felt like the series showed all it had to show in terms of context in episodes 2 and 3, with 4 and on feeling like a rehash. No matter how many new characters or areas or notions were introduced latero on, it still felt like it reached the maximum of its capacity. As expected, it turned to an almost storyless random ecchi premise which henceforth rehashed what was going on in the beginning.

CHARACTERS: 5/10
Analysis: Presence 1/2, Personality 1/2, Backdrop 1/2, Development 1/2, Catharsis 1/2
Generic with openings for improvement that burn out early in the story. I have seen these stereotypes a million times so far and only when they escape their mold by developing is the only way they get my thumbs up. The problem of course is how they remain generic softporn fetishes, with little motivation for you to care about them, and they all pretty much follow the same pattern to the point it becomes boring. They all try to have this cute/sexy feeling combined with heavy drama in the likes of Elfen Lied. You know, cute little sexualized girls that feel emo for being used as weapons and not loved as people? The problem is that Elfen Lied had buckets of blood, death, and nude, amidst a pseudo-excuse for social criticism and moral deconstruction… while C3 is just goofing around with shallow personal drama. No matter how many times they fight, nothing of importance comes out of it and death is just a joke. So by the end of the show you get nothing but your generic dorky male living in a house full of harem bimbos, and the viewer doesn’t care about any of them in the least. You don’t feel like the scriptwriter did much with its characters other than introducing one, presenting a superficial problem, and then thrown aside just to introduce another one with a similar problem. Gets boring fast.

ART: 9/10
Analysis: General Artwork 2/2, Character Figures 1/2, Backgrounds 2/2, Animation 2/2, Visual Effects 2/2
The production values are very good. The character figures are generic as hell, but the visual effects and the cinematics are simply amazing and I was surprised to see this is not a SHAFT production (although it has people who worked for them). The show is basically separated into your typical ecchi comedy with its overused sceneries of schools and houses full of sexy lolis goofing around with a hapless male, and to psychedelic fighting scenes, full of creepy-looking fluorescent weapons and yandere chicks attacking one another. The later part is definitely a lot more eye-captivating as it has far more smooth animation and exciting choreography, although even the silly everyday moments were given attention in terms of cinematics and colour palette. Eventually though, there is very little to look at despite the wonderful way everything is animated for the sole reason there is no actual gravity in whatever happens. Injuries are a joke, weapons are magically appearing out of thin air, and the girls are doing the usual dumb romcom things we see in all such shows.

SOUND: 6/10
Analysis: Voice Acting 2/3, Music Themes 2/4, Sound Effects 2/3
Meh, generic songs and squeaky voices; nothing much. I was surprised to see Fear being voiced by Tamura Yukari and not Rie Kugimiya. Their voices are so alike and Fear is a loli tsundere so why not? Meh, I guess they all sound the same after awhile.

VALUE: 1/10
Analysis: Historical Value 0/3, Rewatchability 0/3, Memorability 1/4
Although a step higher from being just goofball softporn, the series still becomes boring quite fast simply because it is trying to combine light themes with heavy ones in an uneven way. I am more than aware how most famous high seller anime are in effect serious themes presented in a light/comical/sexy way but C3 is not a good example. The transition from ecchi to heavy drama was too sudden and although it was quite a shock the first time it happened on episode 2, the repetition thereafter in almost the exact way didn’t have the same impact. So no, overall the story was bad for becoming repetitive and shallow too fast and too obvious. The ending leaves you completely apathetic and I really wonder if it would be better off if it had ended on episode 3, long before the excitement was gone. I personally find no replay value in the show and didn’t enjoy it much past episodes 2 and 3.

ENJOYMENT: 2/10
This anime looks like a weenie…
c3
… when with care it could look like a monster cock.
C==============3

OVERALL: 4.5/10

I wanted to like this show. Really, I did. It has many elements that I like -- an exploration of the occult, cute girls, a little mystery... But really, this entire series was a slow-motion train-wreck. If I had been in my right mind, I would have given up on it by episode 6, but something compelled me to watch it through to the end. So what went wrong? Firstly, the plot was more tortured than the characters in the story. It was truly impossible to figure out what the deeper story was about. The surface story ... was about the main female character Fear, breaking free of her curse and learning to become a human, not a (cube shaped) tool of the dark forces of the occult. But trying to figure out the rest of the plot was beyond frustrating. At first I thought it was going to be about a mysterious father-figure of Fear, but that wasn't it. How was the school superintendent involved? What was the whole Sovereignty arc even about? What was The Waas Family supposed to be all about? How about the Laboratory Group? Honestly, I don't even care at this point. It was a horrendous collage of almost-good plot ideas that went terribly, terribly wrong. And our male main character, Haruaki, was the typical 1-dimensional harem guy basically along for the ride and did nothing for anyone other than give encouraging words. The last complaint I have is that there was a lot of sadistic violence in the dialog. I object to that, it is unnecessary and it is a cheap way to gain audience sympathy -- but leaves the viewer somewhat traumatized for having had to watch it. If this show had been someone's first introduction into Anime, I would feel sorry that they got such a poor impression of the genre. If you like the occult genre, there are many other mystery horror shows that are far better. Bakemonogatari or Moon-Phase spring to mind. My recommendation for C3? Skip it without regrets. As far as the OVA for the series goes, it was lighthearted and a nice respite from the dreadful main series.