I find myself kind of enjoying how unusual it is. It's strange, but there's nothing sad about it--it takes itself seriously but it's just grounded enough that it's still possible to become vested in the events and characters. It's certainly something that could never have been made today.
It's one of those shows where I had some interest in continuing, but just never quite got around to doing so... that happens, of course.
Anyway, what I meant by sad was that the stories for most of the characters (in those two episodes) were unhappy. Shion has a tragic past and now is mute,
has a pretty unhappy story, etc. I know it's not a completely bleak show or something, it does have lighter bits from what I remember (and shogi), but the central stories are at least unhappy, sometimes tragic, it seems.
The market never existed. I'm sure it was just made to promote the manga.
Why would there be no market for an anime with an interesting, unique, and mostly serious mystery/shogi story? Sure the production values are low, probably because they assume the shogi thing makes it niche, but "no market"? Of course not. Have you watched any of it?
I stand by my statement. Whatever market that may have once existed for this kind of anime is gone. It doesn't stop equally-bizarre and niche things from being produced today, but super-niche traditional game/sport series like this that appear to have been huffing the last fumes of Hikaru no Go and its ilk just doesn't really exist anymore, with the possible exception of something like Chihayafuru, which isn't exactly comparable.
Yeah, I see what you mean... I don't know that a show like that would be made today either. The number of shows airing has declined since then, yes? I agree, I doubt Shion no Ou would get made today. It'd probably need to be more moe and fanservicey.
It certainly doesn't have high production qualities. The problem with adaptations of finished manga are that, especially in the instance of something like Shion no Ou where the source material isn't very long to begin with and it's easy to adapt fully within 1-2 cours, receiving a complete anime adaptation seems to defeat the purpose of advertising the manga because there's no further story. BUY THE MANGA endings are pretty effective because they generally end on notes that tease new developments or would otherwise be unsatisfying if they were the actual ending, but no such advantage exists for complete adaptations. It really does seem like there was no good reason for the series to exist at all.
Not every anime is an advertisement for a manga, you know... I would assume that someone wanted to see this animated and thought it would sell. Maybe they were hoping that it would sell some copies of the manga too, but given that the manga was over already, I wouldn't guess that that's the main reasoning behind it...
