YMMV / Beautiful Bones: Sakurako's Investigation

• Adaptation Displacement: Most who were able to watch the anime/read the manga wouldn't know that it started as a novel series.
• Ass Pull: In Episode 2, when Shotaro gets cornered by the knife-wielding drug addict, a possible Ass Pull in and of itself, he manages to easily subdue the crazed man before revealing himself to be a karate black belt. What makes this more egregrious than your standard example is the sheer lack of effort required to fix it: a simple couple of throwaway lines could suffice for sufficient foreshadowing.
• Complete Monster (anime): The mysterious painter Hanabusa, known as "The Sphenoider", is the shadowy mastermind behind many of the cases. Obsessed with the sphenoid bone, Hanabusa's modus operandi is to get close to potential accomplices and corrupt them. Once he gains their full trust as some type of angel, he abuses them for pleasure, such as giving them a scar shape like a butterfly, before convincing them to commit heinous crimes for him such as murder or suicide, claiming this will give the victims butterfly wings to be "free". Once the crime is done, Hanabusa takes the sphenoid bone from the corpses and adds it to his collection. By the time of the story, he's responsible for countless cold cases which he orchestrated and sets his eyes on Sakurako and Shoutaro after they foiled a number of his plans. A twisted man, Hanabusa is a criminal genius who will stop at nothing to fulfill his dark obsession.
• Narm: "Now, let us solve the mystery!" and the accompanying CGI graphic: awesome the first time, Narmy as hell the fifth or sixth.
  • It's hard to take the emotional scene in episode 5 between Sakurako, the man who displayed the arsenic-tinted painting, and his wife seriously when she's gasping at every other word coming out of Sakurako's mouth.
• Spiritual Adaptation: Most viewers find the show having a similar concept to Bones though Sakurako is warmer than Temperance Brennan. There was even crossover promotion between the two series in Japan.
• Squick:
  • Not everyone may like the "corpse" hobby of Sakurako, especially during the scenes, when she enthusiastically tells about how worms eating corpse or tries to take human skull as a trophy.
  • In episode 8, the heroes come to the conclusion that the previous natural science teacher kept in the school room the skeleton of his lover, who also was his half-sister. And the plot depicts this as an exciting romantic line.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: This is TROYCA's anime, so that the drawing, the use of computer graphics and animation is at a fairly high level.

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