Well I got a good message out of this show.
Chika known for having a tomboyish personality wants to act more feminine so decides on joining the Brass Band in order to clean up her image, however in joining the club she meets her childhood friend Haruta, in doing so and in an effort to aim for the brass band competition and maybe earn sensei Kusakabe's love, the duo set out to find more band members all the while solving mysteries as to why they stopped playing or whatever happens to trouble them.
For any mystery series, the fun comes from working out the solution from the little clues dropped throughout the episode, and then marvelling at the answer if you get it right or still being impressed by the solution despite getting it wrong however for an anime mystery, many clues maybe more common knowledge to the average Japanese person but not the average westerner.
For an example I'll talk about three early episodes, number 2, 4 and 5.
Episode 2 is solving a blank rubix cube which has a clever solution and meaning but still fairly difficult to figure out on your own without knowing how certain materials work.
Episode 4 deals with a mystery of an apartment block that is said to be plagued by ghosts but to solve this requires trivia knowledge of the year they talk about which is exclusive to the Japanese.
Episode 5 deals with a band member's grandfather who came back from America acting amnesiac, while this one is a little more Western friendly it still requires knowledge of historical events, to make it harder it pulls a false solution followed by the actual solution.
But you can see what I'm getting at, even at near 33 years old, I would not guess half the mysteries in this anime because I'm not Japanese. So it's a hard sell for westerners because of it.
I still enjoyed what I saw, the colour palette is glorious, the mysteries are well written, the characters all have great chemistry and I can still appreciate the stuff I do learn from it.
As far as I know, there's no dub.
Final Verdict: As a mystery anime, it's a hard sell for any westerner but if you can accept that then you've got yourselves a good anime.
