A boy moves in to a new apartment, only to discover it’s haunted! The ghost wants to find her (unknown) killer and kill them back, and in the meantime can help the boy find a number of mystical artifacts that are hidden throughout the setting, hidden behind any number of ridiculous puzzles and traps.
It’s nowhere near as exciting as it sounds.
After a brief opening scene of the titular Nanana being something like schoolgirl Indiana Jones, we arrive at the main plot, with main character Juugo Yama declaring his freedom as he comes to live on one of those massive artificial island school-cities that are all the rage in anime. He meets up with his new landlord and after reviewing the highly suspicious terms of the lease (insanely cheap but a year must be paid in advance, non-refundable) he’s introduced to his room, and the fact that he’ll be cohabiting with a cute ghost girl, presuming he doesn’t want to forfeit a year of rent and move out.
This is Nanana (again). She was murdered ten years ago, which is an unsolved case, and everyone involved is startlingly laid back about it. She proves her ghostiness by selectively touching things, vanishing, all that good stuff. Since she’s bound to the room, she also makes sure she’ll be able to continue her gamer-NEET lifestyle with the new roommate. Well, not that she’s alive, but you get the idea.
We also learn that Nanana and the landlady were two of the seven founders of the island – all seven were students at the time, and while they were geniuses with a plan, it was Nanana who found the funding, mostly by doing globe-trotting treasure-seeking. Not all of it was invested though, and an insane fortune remains as the “Nanana Collection”. All the component treasures are somewhere on the island, but after Nanana died nobody knew where they all were, and only a few have been found. Thus, I suppose, we have our primary plot hook.
So, sounds great, and we even get a glimpse of some of this treasure when some thieves try to nab a piece and Juugo finds their drop-off, briefly claiming the magical artifact before a bratty self-proclaimed master detective and her cross-dressing “maid” relieve him of the prize and turn it into the cops to the tune of their own arrest. Evidently, it was a very brief arrest as they transfer into his class.
The “adventure club” at school, concerned with finding the collection, contacts Juugo and recruits him. The detective and maid come with because the detective is a brat. They take the entry test, clearing an absurd puzzle trap room on campus that once held a piece of the collection, so that works out. And, in case you were wondering, Nanana supports the search for her treasure, both because she likes the idea and because something in it might help find her killer. But she also won’t tell anyone where the treasure is because it wouldn’t be fun that way, so we have a show. To be fair she might not even know as apparently a mysterious figure dubbed “Leprechaun” is still hiding these weird magic treasures in various silly puzzle rooms. She does, at least, know enough to give out cryptic hints to Juugo if he passes her stupid tests.
The first treasure hunt turns into a production as the club president and his violent psychopathic girlfriend end up, as the treasure (a magic staff) is retrieved, betraying Juugo and the detective girl and leaving them to die. They get out in part thanks to the random thieves from earlier. Said thieves belong to a group called Matsuri, but they might as well be Team Rocket. Juugo cuts a deal with them and they all try to retrieve the staff from the club president, who wants to use it for world domination.
Turns out he should have checked the manual more, as it has usage limits. Juugo gets his rear kicked but the club president is cornered by island authorities, who forcibly buy the staff off of him. In the aftermath, it seems like Juugo will still be attending the club (after all, he has his own interest in the collection)… and also that he’s deeply related to Matsuri, with his distant, implicitly abusive father who kicked him out being the current kingpin.
So, yeah, that’s a thing. Our main character is not just the heir to a band of phantom thieves, but implied by them, his father, and his encounter with the club president to be a pretty rotten person in his own right, so much so that Nanana’s faith in him seems to shock him, like he’s used to lying and being lied to constantly. Detective girl declares him a rival though, and the show continues as though there were no attempted murders and fewer criminal connections.
The second arc is centered around a treasure near, what else, the local hot springs. Juugo claims it with some ease, and even get the item back from Matsuri when they try to snag it. However, the item turns out to be a fake, and the truth is that Juugo cleared the trap room early in order to prevent a conflict with Matsuri and took the item for himself.
He uses the item as a bargaining chip to have it out with his old flame from Matsuri, allowing them to talk (and brawl) out their differences, feelings of betrayal, and all that jazz, after which he hands the thing over to help mend bridges. This is, somehow, the best ship in the show since while vaguely in the tsundere spectrum the ninja “big sis” type isn’t annoying like the detective can be or irrelevant like the class rep who appears briefly to be flirted with.
The third arc introduces a new antagonist, a former member of the Adventure Club who is geared up with Collection items and their mystical powers and who has a brutal, ruthless persona. He upsets Nanana by calling one of her items trash and terrorizes a werid little underclass girl Juugo is kind of friends with. He also is hated by the landlady for non-payment of rent and mistreatment of Nanana, beats the tar emotionally out of the club president and physically out of his right-hand man… all in all, just a nasty unpleasant piece of work.
The bit with the first-year girl ends up being the motivator to beat him to ruins he evidently hired her to scout (though there are some never-explained questions about that) so that he’ll no longer have any motive to treat her like she knows too much. The party mostly works together to get there first, but he ends up hot on their heels and brawls it out with Juugo and the rest while the detective girl does her best to both figure out the puzzle locking the chest and the creep’s powers.
Eventually, creep is more or less bluffed into withdrawing (though they get some good hits in on him at least), the little girl is safe, and all’s well that more or less ends well. There’s a subplot, with Juugo worrying about what Nanana really wants regarding her ghost existence and finding her killer, but since none of those are even remotely resolved, it mostly just gets us a little more meat (or ectoplasm?) out of Nanana’s character… and not really that much, either.
So, that’s Nanana’s Buried Treasure. As a show, it has two big problems, one that was probably unavoidable and one that I have to sustain as a major issue.
The first is that this is an adaptation of light novels – eleven episodes to three novels, which is a similar pace to something like Unbreakable Machine Doll. But here, the story format really doesn’t like translating at that pace. This show feels like it should be a treasure-of-the-week affair; that’s the weight and gravitas it has to it. The puttering around with the team rocket girlfriend or the jerkass former club member never quite melds with the idea of the treasure hunt, or anything else with the show. The first arc could be excused, since it has to do a lot of legwork to set the characters and scenario, but even that seems downright padded.
That much is a shame, because “a new treasure every novel” makes a lot of sense, is about what the structure looks like, and would need that extra meat and padding to really sustain since the “ruins” that hold the treasures are all one-room puzzles in the end and not really marathon affairs. So that much would have worked a lot better in the story’s original form.
What I’m having trouble imagining working better is the cast. The vast majority of characters in this show are or at least start as deeply unlikable. We’re introduced to our lead, who seems mostly normal at first but is certainly a lech (and not a funny or charming one) and stated to be more of a selfish scumbag – his disagreement with Matsuri that made him walk out on his crush (not that it stops him from ogling anything with boobs) and his whole life is that they’re Robin Hood phantom thieves who help others, and he can’t stand that on a philosophical level. This doesn’t come out strongly in his character, but as male leads in these series go he’s somewhere worse off than milquetoast. Not Daisuke by any means, but not good.
Then there’s the detective girl and her crossdressing maid. The former is one of the better characters in the show, getting some scenes where she’s legitimately showing her stuff on the puzzles and a couple softer moments around Juugo that are watchable, but she also has her times when she’s being shrill and annoying. The latter has no reason to exist. At all. He never contributes to anything; even in terms of group chemistry he’s kind of a gutterball. He’s just there for some really awkward jokes.
The club president, of course, gets off on the horrible foot first, he looks better after meeting the act 3 jackass, but one of his problems with said former senpai is that he got a club girl maimed to clear a ruin… when new club president abandoned Juugo and the detective in a possibly-lethal scenario because. His hanger-on girl, a specific breed of Yandere violent and short-tempered with anyone BUT her crush, tries to be comic relief but fails on account of the fact that a snarling violent beast isn’t funny, and the rapid mode switch is only funny once.
The Matsuri thieves (particularly Juugo’s crush/ex/it’s complicated) and miscellaneous also-rans aren’t notably bad… but they’re not good either, certainly nothing that could be a dark horse reason to watch.
And then there’s Nanana. Poor Nanana is at least okay when she’s on screen, even if she’s largely devoid of any of the pathos a ghost should have… but she’s a site-bound spirit, she literally can’t leave Juugo’s room, so there’s only so much she can be involved in the narrative. I’ll grant that she has a little charm, but there’s an artificiality to it that doesn’t help the show’s case as a whole.
With a cast like that, which is all standard or substandard, Nanana’s Buried Treasure is lacking a critical tool to pull together a production that’s weak and somewhat troubled, so that instead of a fun treasure hunt, what we have is a disappointing slog. If there was even one thing that this show did that was exceptional, that was good enough for me to point to and say “That! That’s a positive reason to watch!” I could forgive the fact that most of the rest of the show is below par (an odd expression now that I realize it; being under par is good in Golf.).
I’m going to err on the side of being merciless here and call Nanana’s Buried Treasure a D. Nothing is all that bad, but there’s just no reason to wade through the bits that are a little bad, no reward for your time or payoff for the experience. There are worse animes you could watch; even restricting yourself to mere schlock you can find shows with lower lows quite easily, but the fact that there just aren’t any highs to bother with really pulls the show down in a big way. A lot of shows I’ve rated higher have deeper pits, but they have something to balance that out. Nanana’s Buried Treasure isn’t worth hating, but it’s not worth digging up either.