1 While I found the "what happens with her later" to be beautifully executed, I agree that it wouldn't be your cup of tea.  By the way, childhood friend, not cousin, if it matters.

In retrospect, though, I'm not sure that it was a good thing.  The sequence in question was so talked about that a lot of the more recent harem comedies have had similar occurrences, and it's getting a little old.

2

Nothing much to add to what Steven says.  Its irritating awfulness did not stem from, say, raw production value failures or being hacked-out crap, but from a near-complete lack of real imagination (or even cute girls).  It's every bad harem comedy trope jammed together in a lumpy, incoherent mass that never congeals.  And even when they tried to come up with something "new" ("Hey, let's make the demon girl sweet and the angel girl rowdy!")...well, if I may quote Spinal Tap, "There's a fine line between clever...and stupid."  The series is also a classic example of "They licensed this while [fill in the blank] remains unlicensed?" 

It was profoundly unneeded on both sides of the Pacific.

3

Missed your comment while I was typing mine, pflorian.  I checked Wikipedia, and holy moley, the series seems to have been really enjoyed by a lot of fans.  I mean, "An Analysis Of Kaede's Psyche Throughout The Anime Series"...?  Clearly it struck a chord with some folks.  Perhaps I was a little too harsh.  It's not for me, but I'm not everybody, and the episodes on the first disk put me off enough that I think I'd have a hard time getting to "the good stuff" now.  It seems a shame they had to clutter up an interesting story with so much clichéd fluff (and that part of my complaint is just grim fact).

I should have learned from my constant defense of Ai Yori Aoshi that personal taste is just that, and it's especially embarassing to have to admit I've used the "just give it a few episodes to get going" argument with AiAo.  My apologies to any Shuffle fans.

4 Heh.  Actually, I liked AiAo too, but I personally thought that the early episodes were the best part of the series, and the rest was for the most part an exercise in wasted potential (though there were some nice moments).  So, yeah, definitely different tastes.

As for Shuffle...I felt that the first ten episodes were weak harem comedy pap, and the next eight were mostly weak harem melodrama pap...the fact that I thought that Rin was a likable character carried me through a lot of the drek, but it wouldn't be something I'd recommend to anyone.

The only reason I'd made it through all those episodes (pretty much in one long marathon) is that I knew (from activity on the anime forum I frequent) that something interesting had happened after that.  Fortunately, I hadn't learned what the interesting thing was, and as a result I reacted to it strongly, which isn't something I get all that often from anime, or indeed from most entertainment.

So, much like Ai Yori Aoshi (though for different reasons), Shuffle is a series that I like much more than I feel it deserves.

5

After being persuaded to take a look at Shuffle beyond its unfortunate opening, I've found it to be...a mess.  It's not completely without merit--indeed there are some surprising good scenes--but it's should never have been made the way it was.  They could have done a classic goofy 12 ep harem comedy with the demon/angel pair, Kaede, and Asa.  Or a serious 12 ep story with just with Kaede and Asa.  Or even a series entirely about the "emotionalization" of Primula.  But mixing all this stuff up in a bucket was a bad idea.  Compare eps 1-5 with 17-21...it's like they're from two completely different series.

Of special irritation to me was the constant failure to wrap up storylines propery. 

We see several episodes of seething angst over Primula, then after she's brought back to learn emotions, which will allow her to control The Most Powerful Magic In the Universe Which Otherwise Could Destroy Us All, she's dumped at home and forgotten (worse, left alone with person collapsing into psychosis).  After the dramatic Kaede storyline plays out, the essential step of building of a new relationship between Rin and her is sort of blithely assumed. 

The series is not without points of interest.  Certainly it's loaded with ideas.  But it is poorly constructed and can't decide what it wants to be, constantly wandering down storylines that sort of trail off into nothingness.

6

Part of the reason the storylines "trail off into nothingness" is because in the original game they culminated in porn scenes. In its original incarnation, Shuffle was an H-game.

7 Well, so was Otoboku, but it... wait, bad example--went nowhere.  I mean KimiAru.... no, again bad example. Popotan?  Haven't seen it.  Clannad?  Kanon? They started as h-games, and there were resolutions to the storylines.  He is My Master? Er, if it didn't have h-game pedigree, it sure had h-doujins.... Fate Stay/Night? Ok, it had h-scenes, and was a game.  But it wrapped up nicely.

Is there a relationship between resolutions in the h-game and the anime?  I don't think so, at least not absolute.  So in other words, what you said:  "Part of the reason..."  The other part being, the writers were either incompetent, idiots, ripping off the poor drooling otaku, or just plain lazy.  Note those choices are not mutually exclusive.

8 Of what I've seen among H-game conversions, and what I can remember, three come to mind as well done, especially regarding to the ending. To Heart was the best thanks to Shiho. Also, it was basically G rated. FS/N has a dramatic and powerful ending, more interesting because it's not a Hollywood ending. It also has (or has not, depending how you count) a sex scene which one of my online buddies called "the most lackluster attempt to cut around"). And finally, ef was wrapped more or less well -- also we get to see some action, although not much. It looks almost as if there's an inverse corellation. What it means for Shuffle is, there's no excuse not to wrap things up properly in an H-game conversion.

9

Popotan was surprisingly good, but it didn't make any attempt at all to salvage the story told in the H-game. All they kept was character designs of the girls and the set drawing of the christmas house. Aside from that, they started completely from scratch.

So it doesn't really represent a test case of whether it's possible to do a good job of adapting the story from an H-game to a non-H anime.

(I didn't think Kanon and Clannad were H-games.)