Hiiro No Kakera Season One is a supernatural drama and contains the story arc called the Tamayori Princess Saga.  The show starts off with a high school girl named Tamaki Kasuga taking a bus to her grandmother's house where she is going to live.  She arrives early and decides to walk down a path for some sightseeing.  On her way down the path she sees a little creature that looks like a ghost that sort of resembles a Puyo (from Puyo Pop, Kirby's Avalanche, Dr.Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine, and many more titles) but it runs off and then she gets surrounded by big black one-eyed monsters that have goo coming out of them.  Tamaki freaks out but gets lucky as the person that was suppose to guide her to the house who is named Takuma Onizaki shows up and tells her what they are.  Turns out what she saw were gods that are freaking out because they are scared of her.  Takuma hands her a seal and asks her to recite a spell that will drive them away back to their homes.  Tamaki pulls it off and beats the big black one eyed monsters and then Takuma guides her to her grandmothers house.  Tamaki's grandmother explains to her that the reason why Tamaki is living there is because she is the next tamayori princess and that she'll also have four guardians called the five guardians (I don't get it either) protecting her.  The guardians are: Takuma Onizaki (the same guy who helped her beat off the big black one eyed monsters),  Mahiro Atori (short dude with a temper), Yuuichi Komura (guy with white hair that can sleep at will), and Shinji Inukai (a very shy guy that cooks).  They also have another job and that's to protect the five artifacts that if stolen could cause the end of the world and it wouldn't be an anime if there wasn't a group of bad dudes trying to steal them would it?  Yes there are bad dudes trying to steal family jewels to cause chaos if you didn't catch my drift from the previous sentence.

The story sounds promising but the way it presents itself is very disappointing as it just goes completely over your head but not because it's overly complicated but because it's not very memorable.  Every time I go to re-watch episodes to get what's going on it feels like I'm watching a new episode each time and this is a very bad thing as it's very frustrating to have to do this to just get the general idea of what the show is about.  Characters are OK but there isn't anything special about them as we've seen these kinds of characters before in much better shows.  There are also some characters that are really annoying that I just want to beat in their skull with a cinderblock until their heads look like splattered watermelons.  The fight scenes are very boring and dull to the point that I wanted to turn off the TV and go outside and play but sadly I couldn't do that as that would be a bad thing to do as I'm reviewing this.  At the end of every episode is a scene that has one of the main characters trying to convince you to watch the next episode and yes it does sound very sad but it comes off as being very creepy instead.  The most creepy of these segments was one where Yuuichi was in a bathtub inviting the viewers to come in the tub with him so we can spoon.  To be fair these segments are aimed at the female audience but even they won't be charmed in by this.

I'm mixed with the artwork as some characters look very pretty but the rest of the character designs are very uninspiring and lazy looking plus some of the shadowing looks very crappy.  Backgrounds are the best thing about the artwork as they are very beautiful looking with nice lush greenery in the forest, wonderful woodwork on the school, and nice wavy waterfalls at the river.  Animation is OK for the most part but you will come across some very terrible looking animation in the battle scenes and some awkward looking mouth flaps that make it look like a puppet is talking.  English dub sounds good but there are some lines that are very cringe worthy and will make you chuckle at how bad they are.  Soundtrack is actually pretty good with some pretty calming music that will make you feel like that you are sleeping in a forest and funny enough the show makes you want to fall asleep in a forest.

Special features include text-less opening and closing sequences that are pretty good looking with some nice songs.  One last thing before I give my rating, this anime is actually based on a Playstation 2 game of the same name that came out all the way back in 2006 and it has also ports and sequels on Playstation Portable, Playstation 3, and Nintendo DS but sadly the games are more expensive than the animation.  Overall don't even bother with this show as it's sloppy, lazy, creepy, and very boring.  Really disappointing show.