Overall 4 Story 5 Animation 7 Sound 6 Character 4 Enjoyment 3

[DROPPED]_____________________________________________________________________________________________________I'm not a fan of talking about something i'm dropping, mainly because it's literally impossible to make a holistic ome review of a show or movie without actually completing it. That being said, I don't really see anything inherently wrong with dropping something if it simply doesn't grab your interest or maybe even loses your interest as you continue watching it.Welcome to the NHK isn't an aggressively bad piece of filmaking. In fact, i'd say that it has a lot of positives. However, it seems like a fairly decisive work. I feel as though the entire show changes and the changes that happen aren't particularly interesting.I don't want to make a habit out of writing a review about a show I didn't finish unless I have a decent amount to say about it._____________________________________________________________________________________________________[The Start and the Change]My attitude towards NHK wasn't always so... I don't know, exhausted. In fact, a few weeks ago when I began with this show I was completely in love with it! The first five episodes are genuinely entertaining, funny, satirical, and interesting. Following the life of a NEET who's pretty self-aware and willing to try improve is something that i haven't seen before. More importantly, the idea that this show wasn't painting this kind of shitty lifestyle as "cool" or "special" is also something I definitely haven't seen before in anime.So many anime have a NEET protagonist who's this awesome, charming, interesting guy who has twelve girls wanting to ride his meat popsicle that I get completely sick of the entire trope. Just cause you don't do shit doesn't mean you are a special. In fact, 99% of the time you are just a waste of space who bums around thinking they are special and that's about it.So with NHK I was surprised to see them do the opposite of glorifying this awful lifestyle. Their approach to it was refreshing enough, but the fascinating, semi-abstract imagery and use of dream-sequences to express interesting symbolism was something that I fully got invested in. The introduction of the other protagonist who, for all intents and purposes plays as "The Pixie Dream Girl", didn't even detract from my experience.As I said, it was funny, witty, pretty, and engaging through and through....So Misaki, a young-ish girl who takes an interest in our protagonist starts out fine enough. They have these night meetings and slowly learn more about each other and well, the story is obvious from there. They are clearly going to get into each other. And while it wasn't exciting or interesting, the other parts that made this show continue to shine are the more satirical elements it wraps itself up in.A constant self-aware barrage of meta-humor and often funny jabs at the entire "Otaku" community is kind of refreshing. The other secondary that plays off our protagonist is Yamazaki who is infinitely more engaging than Misaki and fits with the overall overlap between NEET and anime-nerd. What's a funny turn of events is that our protagonists manifesting infatuation with anime actually helps him spread his wings and become more social, while also having hilarious side-effects as well.Not only that, the show had consistently solid animations with some pretty solid character designs. Every character felt unique while still being a more realistic approach to design. The dream sequences helped sell the kind of world we are peering into, however, the overall crippling loneliness didn't really come off as too prevalent within this show. I read up on the changes made for this show and unfortunately, from what I read, every change that was made to this show made it more consumer friendly. Especially the changes to the apparent drug-use within the manga that really didn't appear at all in the adaptation. This made for the trippy sequences being a hard, often cool looking but not necessarily believable, sell.The B-Story, which involves these two characters trying to make something they pleasantly call a "Gal Game" is just great. It floats as the A-story for around six episodes before being taken over by the obvious romantic plot that eventually ends up ruining the show for me....So lets talk about romance. This show likes having romance. Is it good at portraying romance though? No. We have these two nerdy characters fawn over girls and their antics are often played up to the point where it's funny, but when NHK makes the transition from being comedy-oriented to being drama-oriented is where the flaws start springing up.Misaki is, through and through, a Pixie Dream Girl. A Pixie Dream Girl is a fairly common character archetype and trope in both anime and western film/television. These characters are often eccentric, cute girls that meet the character and carry them along on all sorts of adventures, teaching them a thing or two and overall helping them develop. While i'm generally very unfazed by this trope, it does have a lot of character beats that are fairly obvious. For example, a traumatic past, or a sprouting infatuation with the main character.In NHK they really do nothing to alter that. Everything is played straight with Misaki and her role as a "girl of mystery" soon fades and she gains a new role, the "I hope this scene is short cause it's boring", role. Which really isn't too good to have. All the romance between her and the MC is so blunt and cliche that it's like i'm watching a completely different show.The "two characters lean in to kiss in a moment of passion but get interrupted by something zany" actually happens... While this may not be a big deal to some, I want to re-iterate, this show, for the majority of its early episodes, poked hella fun at just about every trope and archetype known in anime. So the fact that they went ahead and did this bullshit is both shocking and disheartening from a creative standpoint....This romance continues as we discover that not only does Misaki want our main characters beef-cannon but there's also another, more interesting female in the show that has some tension with the MC as well. This leads to the moment where i realized this show just became fucking dumb really fast. There's a suicide arc in this show and it's so absurdly... absurd, that i just couldn't sit through it with a straight face. I was honestly expecting them to pull the rug from under the viewer and say" aha! We knew this was dumb all along!" But no, this was played seriously.It was so, so bad. It got so ridiculous that all the interest i had with this show just oozed out of me. The video game arc was almost completely forgotten in favor of just more predictable romance bullshit that I can get from just about any other romance anime out there. The comedy gets slowly forgotten about as well and we are left with these half-good characters in a setting that is yawn-worthy.What's so surprising is that after deciding that this show has lost me completely, I read a bunch of the reviews on MAL. To my surprise people were praising this show for it's realism. The fucking realism! Either these people have no gauge on reality whatsoever or they live in some fantasy anime world where every nerd has a hot girl spying on him from her mansion just waiting to jump at the opportunity to run her fingers through all that greasy hair.This kind of unbelievability isn't undercut by anything either. It's played seriously. So the dramatic escalation gets escalated to the point that i can't take it seriously and to the point where I just don't care. All these various characters are introduced within the middle half of the show and they are just about as un-engaging as some characters can get. Welcome to the NHK changed._____________________________________________________________________________________________________[Dropping]All I can say is that I tried. This show really isn't too bad. It's far from the worst thing i've ever seen. But it lost my interest completely. It's almost like if it didn't start off so good then I would've probably kept watching, if that makes any sense. But i'm a human being, and when a show disappoints me so consistently I begin going into the next episode with a bitter mindset. Or I even begin making excuses why I shouldn't watch the next episode. When I would rather do homework than watch a television show, you know that show must not be doing its job too well.That's kind of where NHK left me. I didn't really want to continue watching this show. I felt like I was getting nothing from the viewing experience and these characters were doing nothing but becoming more annoy9ing and oblivious as time went on. Every episode past eight-or-so began introducing elements that I wasn't a fan of.That once realistic and fairly funny peak into the life of a socially-awkward and NEET character turned into yet another unrealistic portrayal of a romance that would never actually happen in anything but a TV show. Which is disappointing. I kind of wish it just stayed funny and sporadic and didn't attempt to tell a story it wasn't equipped with telling. By that I mean a story that's been told a million times already.If you are going to be addressing a cliche and using it in your story, and literally every story ever has some kind of cliche, then to make that cliche palatable try and put any kind of twist on it. NHK failed to do so and created a product that drained my early infatuation rather quickly.If you are looking for something different then this show could deliver that for the first few episodes at least. You get a much more mature, yet immature life of a poor guy living in a small apartment. There is a lot of semi-censored realism to his life and thoughts that even I could relate to. But that realism slowly gets replaced with cliche romance and that eventually reduces this potentially engaging product into a pile of nothing.