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  "description": "Cabbage reviwed the anime adaptation of Takopi's Original Sin on her always-fun Cabbage Sorter blog. Takopi was a short six-episode series which aired in summer season 2025. It was one of the last shows I watched before I started failing and fell approximately 2.5 anime seasons behind (thus greatly delaying my 2025 anime review article). I agree in the main with Cabbage's review of Takopi. The show held my attention, but it suffers from giving the impression of being a thought experiment too […]",
  "path": "/naferrell/takopi-review-reminds-of-narcissu-04-03-26/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-04-03T19:00:50.000Z",
  "site": "https://social.emucafe.org",
  "tags": [
    "alTogether",
    "alTogether2005",
    "anime",
    "anime2025",
    "narcissu",
    "nljAddenda",
    "visualNovels",
    "wrote full reviews of 29 of the 31 visual novels",
    "ranking the novels from 31-1",
    "here",
    "Narcissu’s critical acclaim on VNDB",
    "ranking it just 8th",
    "his more recent work, Christmas Tina",
    "Webmention"
  ],
  "textContent": "Cabbage reviwed the anime adaptation of Takopi’s Original Sin on her always-fun Cabbage Sorter blog. Takopi was a short six-episode series which aired in summer season 2025. It was one of the last shows I watched before I started failing and fell approximately 2.5 anime seasons behind (thus greatly delaying my 2025 anime review article). I agree in the main with Cabbage’s review of Takopi. The show held my attention, but it suffers from giving the impression of being a thought experiment too oftent delivered with 2×4-to-the-face subtlety. It held my attention in a “what will go sideways next?” kind of way, but I can’t call it  _good_(especially after the strange ending).\n\nBut the reason I share Cabbage’s review is less about Takopi itself (which will not be eligible for any of my 2025 TV anime awards in any event since it is not a full-length season) and more about my own prior reviews. From 2021-2024, I wrote full reviews of 29 of the 31 visual novels that were officially part of the 2005, 2006, and 2008 al|together visual novel localization festivals, and I concluded my review project by ranking the novels from 31-1. The most well-known of the al|together novels and the highest regarded outside Japan (I cannot speak for inside Japan) is the depressing Narcissu, which I reviwed here. Despite Narcissu’s critical acclaim on VNDB, I ended up ranking it just 8th in my final al|together evaluation. While I do think Narcissu is an objectively good piece in the final evaluation, I had issues with it. One of those issues was its tendency to make the people surrounding the terminally ill main duo “too perfectly” callous (if not “cruel”) and dumb. It made the piece feel “too clean and clinical” (that and some other lapses in realism) in an effort to raise, if not answer, a particular question the author wanted to ask. Those issues ultimately relegated one of the highest quality submissions to the al|together festival (and a genuinely important historical piece in the English visual novel localization scene) to the latter-half of my al|together top-10. (I will note some of the tendencies of author Tomo Kataoka that I did not like in Narcissu were tempered for the better in his more recent work, Christmas Tina.\n\nYou can reply to this article from your own site by sending a Webmention.",
  "title": "Takopi’s Original Sin Review Reminds Me of Narcissu",
  "updatedAt": "2026-04-03T19:27:34.000Z"
}