Oh my God, where to start? This anime is up there on my list of all time biggest disappointments. Being a huge fan of the cyberpunk genre and dystopias in general, and seeing it recommended by so many others, I knew that I simply had to watch this show. And after watching the first couple of episodes I was convinced that this was going to be a spectacular story. Unfortunately, the series peaks right around this same time and it is a long, slow, boring decline for the next 20 episodes.
This anime commits one of the cardinal sins in storytelling. That is, it relies HEAVILY on exposition. "Show, don't tell" is a piece of advice that Ergo Proxy would certainly have benefited from. Instead we are subjected to entire episodes full of almost nothing but exposition. It is just not fun. And if the heavy amount of exposition isn't bad enough, we are also forced to endure tedious one-off episodes that are of, at best, questionable value to the rest of the plot.
Then there are the characters. I'm going to be honest - for the most part, they are dull as hell. Vincent Law, in addition to being fundamentally uninteresting, is a whiny, weak-willed shell of a man. Re-l, on the other hand, spent vast spans of the show being little more than a huge, huge bitch. Pino is the only character that I had any sort of affection for but she's hardly an important character.
There is some good to be said: the music is top notch. The art and animation is also good for the most part but is of inconsistent quality and suffers overall as the story progresses. The setting is also quite interesting.
All in all, I had to seriously force myself to finish this. After realizing how disappointed I was in it I knew that I wanted to write a review, but I refused to write a review for something that I hadn't bothered finishing. The last six episodes took me 3 days to watch. That's how excruciating the experience was.
My recommendation is to avoid this one.
***1/2 out of **********
This anime commits one of the cardinal sins in storytelling. That is, it relies HEAVILY on exposition. "Show, don't tell" is a piece of advice that Ergo Proxy would certainly have benefited from. Instead we are subjected to entire episodes full of almost nothing but exposition. It is just not fun. And if the heavy amount of exposition isn't bad enough, we are also forced to endure tedious one-off episodes that are of, at best, questionable value to the rest of the plot.
Then there are the characters. I'm going to be honest - for the most part, they are dull as hell. Vincent Law, in addition to being fundamentally uninteresting, is a whiny, weak-willed shell of a man. Re-l, on the other hand, spent vast spans of the show being little more than a huge, huge bitch. Pino is the only character that I had any sort of affection for but she's hardly an important character.
There is some good to be said: the music is top notch. The art and animation is also good for the most part but is of inconsistent quality and suffers overall as the story progresses. The setting is also quite interesting.
All in all, I had to seriously force myself to finish this. After realizing how disappointed I was in it I knew that I wanted to write a review, but I refused to write a review for something that I hadn't bothered finishing. The last six episodes took me 3 days to watch. That's how excruciating the experience was.
My recommendation is to avoid this one.
***1/2 out of **********