Is March Comes In Like a Lion Worth Watching? The Codex Puts It at 8.45, and Two Criteria Decide It

A seinen drama carried by a 9.0 on character and a 9.0 on themes, taxed by a meandering first season — worth the 22 episodes if you came for interiority, not plot.

Most people just want to know: is March Comes In Like a Lion worth your time, and for whom? Answer that fast, then back it with the rubric. Yes, if you can tolerate a first season that wanders on purpose and a director who occasionally mistakes a surreal water cut for an emotional argument. No, if you measure a 22-episode commitment in plot beats per hour.

Is March Comes In Like a Lion Worth Watching If You Trust the MyAnimeList Consensus?

The MyAnimeList crowd scores it 8.37. Engage that consensus directly: it's roughly correct as a directional verdict and slightly under-calibrated on what's actually doing the work. The Anime Codex weighted score lands at 8.45 — close enough to the aggregate that we're not staging a contrarian rescue, but the gap matters, because the crowd treats March as a single mood and the rubric treats it as six separable axes. Two of those axes — character and themes, both 9.0 — are doing almost all the lifting. The rest is competent. One number, cultural impact at 7.0, is where the show's reputation gets quietly capped.

The standard fan defense is that Shaft's stylization and Chica Umino's writing combine into something atmospheric and unimpeachable. That's a vibe argument. The honest version is that this is a show with two elite criteria, two solid ones, one stylistically uneven one, and a niche cultural footprint — and the question of whether to watch it depends entirely on which of those you weight.

The 9.0 on Character Is the Real Reason to Watch

Rei Kiriyama is the most precise depiction of clinical depression in the seinen drama canon, and the precision is structural rather than tonal. The show refuses to let his condition resolve into a single arc. His relationship with his adoptive sister Kyouko is written as ongoing manipulation rather than a flashback to be processed, and Kouda — the adoptive father whose household Rei fled — is allowed to remain a complicated antagonist rather than a villain to be defeated. This is not the shape grief takes in shows that want closure. It's the shape grief takes when the writer has decided closure isn't on offer.

The Kawamoto sisters are the load-bearing structural counterweight, and they work because they aren't idealized. Akari's caretaking instinct masks her own unresolved grief over her mother. Hinata's moral courage during the bullying subplot — standing by her friend Chiho — is the show's clearest ethical statement, and it's given to a middle-schooler rather than to Rei, which is the right call. The shogi-world supporting cast does similar work. Shimada's stomach ulcers and Nikaidou's chronic illness aren't quirks; they're the cost of a profession the show takes seriously. This is the same kind of populated-room character writing that lands Honey and Clover at 8.66 — and Umino is the writer behind both, which is not a coincidence so much as a method.

The 9.0 on Themes Is Where the Show Earns Its Length

Themes at 9.0 is the criterion that justifies the 22-episode runtime. The show is, in plain terms, about the labor of recovery — not the event of it. Shogi functions as a working metaphor for isolation and the discipline of carrying on, and the metaphor stays load-bearing because the show keeps returning to it from new angles: as Rei's livelihood, as his inheritance from his birth father, as the architecture he uses to avoid the Kawamotos and the architecture he eventually uses to approach them.

The bullying subplot is the test case. A weaker show would have used Chiho's situation as a detour from Rei's arc. March uses it to articulate a thesis — that standing by someone is itself a discipline — and then folds the thesis back into Rei's own behavior. That's the kind of thematic integration that separates a tender drama from a sentimental one, and it's why the Codex puts March in the same emotional-resonance conversation as the works on the themes axis leaderboard.

The 8.0 on Story Is the Reason the First Season Drags

Story scores 8.0, and the number is honest. The first season is structurally meandering. Episodes stall on tangential vignettes — minor shogi-hall character beats, food-focused Kawamoto interludes — that serve mood at the cost of momentum. The Nikaidou match and the Shimada-Gotou storyline are the season's spine, and they are good, but they are interrupted often enough that a viewer trained on tighter narrative construction will feel the slack.

The defense is that the show is built on emotional accumulation rather than plot. That defense is real, not a cope — the tournament arcs land harder in season two precisely because the first season spent twenty episodes establishing what Rei has to lose. But it means the show fails the most common test viewers actually apply, which is whether each episode advances something concrete. Several don't. If that disqualifies a show for you, March will disqualify itself by episode six.

The 8.5 on Animation Is Shaft Being Shaft, for Better and Worse

Akiyuki Shinbou's team externalizes Rei's interior life through the studio's standard toolkit: surreal water imagery, abstract emotional landscapes, sudden art-style shifts. The drowning motif — Rei underwater, breathless — is the strongest recurring visual idea in the show, and it works because it's reserved for moments when his depression is doing something language can't. The understated character animation in the Kawamoto scenes is the necessary counterweight, and the color work between the cold shogi hall and the wagashi-warm kitchen is one of the cleanest tonal contrasts Shaft has executed.

The cost is that the experimental flourishes occasionally feel indulgent. A show this committed to interior realism doesn't always benefit from Shaft cutting to a chibi gag in the middle of a depressive episode. The 8.5 is a real ceiling, not a courtesy — direction this good, with this much tonal whiplash, doesn't get a 9.

The Counter-Argument: It's a 9, and the Rubric Is Underweighting the Atmosphere

The strongest opposing case is that March is a 9-tier work and the Codex is being stingy by separating atmosphere into discrete criteria that can't individually carry it. There's a version of this argument that's correct: Shinbou's direction, Umino's writing, and Yuki Kajiura's score combine into an emotional register that no single 8.0 or 8.5 captures. Atmosphere is a real critical category.

The rubric reads it differently because atmosphere without structural support inflates fast. World-building at 8.0 is grounded but not inventive. Cultural impact at 7.0 is the honest ceiling — March is a benchmark within the quiet-drama lane of seinen, not a landmark outside it. A show with two 9.0s and a 7.0 is a specific kind of excellent: deep in its niche, narrow in its reach.

The 8.45 is what that profile is worth. Watch it for Rei and the Kawamotos, watch it for the bullying arc, and tolerate the first-season drift. If those terms don't appeal, the next 8.4 in the catalogue probably will.