He last visited them seven years ago, but he remembers nothing much from that time period, including whether he enjoyed their city. From the beginning, the relationship between Yuichi and Nayuki seems complicated and nuanced, but by the time that first episode ends, it's really not clear why viewers should continue to the next one; there's no real sense of a plot that needs resolution.

Later episodes pick up the pace somewhat, and throw in a bunch of mysteries, as Yuichi runs into a series of girls with memory problems and past connections with him. There's Ayu, a young-seeming girl who keeps inadvertently robbing a food stand, and who says she's lost something important, though she can't remember what. There's Shiori, a girl too sick to attend classes, who nonetheless shows up and stands around outside the school, waiting for someone, though she can't seem to remember any details about the prospective meeting. And then there's the girl who ineffectually attacks Yuichi on the street, claiming she has complete amnesia, except that she remembers him, and that she hates him.

Gradually, Kanon evolves into something like a "harem" series, along the lines of Tenchi Muyo or Oh! My Goddess, except that Yuichi is remarkably self-possessed, good-humored and all-around victorious for a harem-show hero. Instead of ineffectually flailing around as things get out of hand, he gives as good as he gets. He's a fairly cool hero, who takes it in stride as more and more girls gather around him with missing memories and personal associations with him. He also seems to be an authentically nice guy who does what he can to help those girls, even the ones who perpetually annoy him.

So laid-back it's falling over

This is the second anime adaptation of Kanon, a popular Japanese PC game that's made it into just about every format imaginable—manga, young-adult novels, story CDs, even a previous anime adaptation that ran to 13 episodes and an OVA. This latest iteration stretches to 24 episodes, which may explain why it feels so relaxed and attenuated. Like the original game, it spends most of its time on sprawling, involved interactions between characters, and it seems to be more about building relationships than anything else. Eventually, the series explains all the memory losses and pulls out some fairly large surprises, but it feels more like a low-key romance than a mystery.

It also feels a lot like a magical-girl series, largely part because of all the cute girls and the visual emphasis on their disturbingly huge, quivering eyes. The animation—by Kyoto Animation, home of the similarly game-based, similarly popular Air series—is surprisingly sophisticated, given the simple, overly cartoony girl character design. (In keeping with Yuichi's position as the game-player's avatar, he's drawn in a much less exaggerated, cartoony fashion.) Part of the series' conceit is that it's a winter story, that the town is always blanketed in snow and that Yuichi and his friends often wind up walking around in beautiful, crystalline, snowy nights, representative of their frozen but slowly thawing mental states. For all that, the visuals are often distinctly warm and softly lit. It's an emotional series, and the emotions come out as much in the fuzzy-edged, pastel visuals as they do in the emotive music.

Kanon is an unusual series, personally intense yet often static and quiet. It's generally an excellent break from same-old same-old fight dramas, but it requires some patience and a taste for gentle romance. In a lot of ways, it really is the original game in animated form: Viewers don't get to choose how to proceed, but they need to be the kind of people who'd get some satisfaction from watching a bevy of girls dance attendance on a genuinely nice guy who, in the end, gets all his questions answered.