Durarara!!x2 Ketsu

As Mikado Ryuugamine continues to purge the Dollars from within in accordance with his warped sense of justice, Masaomi Kida hopes to bring his friend back to his senses by bringing the Yellow Scarves together once more. Little do they know that a far more dominant force is about to enter their struggle for power, one that their friend Anri Sonohara is all too familiar with.

Meanwhile, the group that has gathered at Shinra Kishitani's apartment realizes that they are on the brink of something life-changing, an event that will throw Ikebukuro into a spiral of confusion. Their anxiety is realized when reports of Celty's head being found in public start to appear all over the news as Kasane Kujiragi begins to make her move.

Gone are the brief periods of tranquility as the current turmoil sets the stage for one final performance in this thrilling conclusion to the story of Ikebukuro's finest.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Orihara, Izaya Main

Kamiya, Hiroshi Japanese

Heiwajima, Shizuo Main

Ono, Daisuke Japanese

Sturluson, Celty Main

Sawashiro, Miyuki Japanese

Kida, Masaomi Main

Miyano, Mamoru Japanese

Kishitani, Shinra Main

Fukuyama, Jun Japanese

Ryuugamine, Mikado Main

Toyonaga, Toshiyuki Japanese

Sonohara, Anri Main

Hanazawa, Kana Japanese

Brezhnev, Semyon Supporting

Kuroda, Takaya Japanese

Kadota, Kyouhei Supporting

Nakamura, Yuuichi Japanese

Karisawa, Erika Supporting

Takagaki, Ayahi Japanese

Maruyama, Hiroo Producer

Ogisu, Hirotsugu Producer

Satou, Yumi Producer

Yokoyama, Shuko Producer

Reviews

Apr 1, 2016

AscendingAudio

Recommended

To begin off, I'd like to point out one thing:
Seeing Shizuo ride a bike going over 60 mph in episode 5 made the rest worth it.
Although the story was a bit of a turn off because it involved a lot of miscommunication, it really portrayed what lengths people will go to if they truly believe in something, whether it be for good or for harm. I very much recommend this series as something to learn from, because it definitely shows that clear communication of feelings and a sharp understanding of a situation are the most important aspects of today's society.

Reviewer’s Rating: 7

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Apr 3, 2016

Lancehot

Mixed Feelings

After six years & sixty episodes (not including specials), Ketsu sees Narita Ryohgo's Durarara (DRRR) adaptation finally come to an end. Director Takahiro Omori's apparently masochistic determination to finish the job with DRRR like he couldn't with Baccano has disappointed many, with interest in DRRR having been deeply eroded by the passage of time & the production & story problems that have dogged X2 from the start. But whether or not there are many people left who wanted it, we finally got an ending: one that we could only hope was better than the wet fart the first series ended on so long ago.

As has ... become expected of DRRR, Ketsu opens by once again dumping a heap of plot points & characters into the first episode & gradually unravelling how they all interact with each other. This has always been a strong point of DRRR &, while Ketsu is picking up pretty much exactly where Ten left off, it still manages to give itself a needed momentum boost in its first couple of episodes to keep viewers engaged as the story finally moves to a finale. The way characters drop in & out of each others orbit as they go about their business in Ikebukuro, never as coincidentally as it might first appear, is what has distinguished DRRR from its competition & continues to do so even at this late stage.

Unfortunately, also as has become expected of DRRR, after the first three or so episodes things slow down considerably as the show focuses more on which characters & stories are going to be the most important. Given that this is the final part it's what one would expect to happen, but in doing so it reminds one of one of the glaring problems with DRRR, because once again the focus is on Mikado, Masaomi & Anri, three characters who have long since been eclipsed by the other goings on in the city.

While Masaomi trying to save Mikado from becoming embroiled into the goings on in Ikebukuro has been a central pillar of DRRR since it began, it's also a story that has been stuck on loop for almost as long. Ketsu sees the Dollars & Yellow Scarves on what feels like their third showdown as Masaomi once again seeks to destroy the Dollars to free Mikado from their grasp, despite the audience being well aware that Mikado is much more involved than he Masaomi knows. Even if you consider, as I do, Sho to have been in part a ret-con of the ending of the first series, it's hard to not feel so fed up with this protracted plot to the point that seeing it resurrected & resolved again is just frustrating.

Meanwhile Anri & her relationship with the demon sword Saika has become entangled in a story so convoluted as to make it hard enough to follow, let alone care. Saika has gone from being, as it were, the physical manifestation of Anri's insecurities from an abusive childhood & the horrific murder-suicide of her parents, to by Ketsu there now being three Saika wielders, one of whom has Spiderman powers because why not, & seemingly everyone in Ikebukuro who isn't a named character being a thrall to one of them. By the time of the big finale Anri's continued “Am I a monster or human?” dilemma feels almost insignificant compared to what's going on around her, while the Saika part of the big event being orchestrated in part by Haruna & Takeshi seems like it happens for the sake of having everyone in one place for the finale.

Convoluted is a word that best describes DRRR at this point. Throughout X2 it's been fairly apparent that the mind boggling number of new characters that have been added to DRRR are primarily meant to distract from how the main characters have been stuck in a loop. The end credit character scroll of Ketsu is now so crammed with characters that you need a help sheet to name them all. While some of these characters have been welcome additions, it's hard not to watch all these faces passing by & think “who are these people & why should I care?”

Several of those previously important characters, meanwhile, have suffered for DRRR's refusal to end or let them move on. Izaya, who began as the apparent antagonist & scheming mastermind behind everything in Ikebukuro, by the the end of Ketsu just seems like an angst ridden kid. At first, this dressing down of a character who clearly had delusions of grandeur was a welcome turn of events, a reminder that he only seemed a big fish because Ikebukuro is such a small pond. It also played into the overall theme of monsters vs humans & how many in DRRR, Izaya included, were regular people who found themselves in a place where the exceptional & supernatural seemed normal & thought “me too!” Despite that, though, it's hard to really see what the point of Izaya's story was once this change in perspective occurred around the end of Sho; nor does his ongoing fight with Shizuo seem like anything more than a pointless schoolboy feud that continued for the sake of the over the top action scenes it allowed for.

Celty, meanwhile, has suffered what one might call the Ned Flanders effect. You don't have to spend long reading opinions on DRRR to see that a lot of fans liked Celty best when she was acting like a flustered girl around Shinra. While this did have the positive effect of humanising an inhuman character, by Ketsu it's been played up to such a point that it's her main character trait. The resolution of her story, finding her head & dealing with the expected fallout from her regaining her memories, ultimately just ends up as serving as a Dullahan ex Machina way to resolve the climax of the series without anybody dying.

Those production issues that have been a constant source of comment from the beginning of X2 remain, as well. Indeed, it's so accepted that at this point bringing it up is like beating a dead horse. While Ten fortunately put the low point of missing inbetweens & wonky character art that plagued Shou behind it, Ketsu still looks poor by the standards of its contemporaries. Most notable is the singular inability for the artists to make the 3D backgrounds mesh with the hand drawn characters. At no point does it look like the characters are part of their environment & while to a degree this is a problem that can be found in almost all anime made today, the lower production quality of X2 makes it stand out like a sore thumb.

That's not to say everything about Ketsu is a disappointment. While the presence of several of DRRR's better support characters is notably lacking, characters like Erika, Verona & Shizuo continue to have at least some role without feeling token or forced. Not every character resolution feels disappointing, or at least in instances like Celty & Shinra it's hard to see how it could have been expected to play out differently. & even if ultimately Ketsu ends in a surprisingly similar way to the first series, it doesn't feel as much of a cop out as it did then. It's just a shame that so much of the focus of Ketsu, & the resolution of DRRR as a whole, seems focused on characters who, in a sense, have long since been outgrown by the world they inhabit. Indeed, arguably DRRR as a whole long since grew beyond the ability of its author to resolve it in a satisfactory way.

Still, at least we got an ending. X2 may have been a let down for many, both in story & production terms, but at least they tried to give DRRR a proper resolution rather than leaving it as one of anime's many half finished casualties of a business model that sees animation as a promotional tie in to another media source. The story may have got convoluted & much of its resolution feels like a disappointment, but at least they decided to stick with DRRR's signature mix of interwoven narratives rather than following Shaft & Oisin's example of dropping the pretence that the Monogatari series is anything more than a series of barely connected short stories that happen to share characters.

Indeed, focusing on the individual plot lines in DRRR is to in some ways miss what made it such an engaging series for many of its fans. Like a Jackson Pollock painting, it's not so much the individual trails of paint that you focus on, but instead let yourself be absorbed by the whole. When DRRR was good, it was very good (my arbitrary score for the two series as a whole would be around 7), & while it never transcended to the levels of excellence, at least it could usually claim to be interesting, a claim fewer & fewer anime seem to be able to make as aesthetics & sentimentality become ever more the standard. Alas, to continue with the laboured art analogy, Ketsu is the culmination of what was perhaps DRRR's fundamental flaw: if you mix too many colours, it all ends up brown.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Mar 26, 2016

Flawfinder

Not Recommended

I'll never understand what it is about Durarara that still has people showering praise on it to this very day, because quite frankly it's gotten so bad that the first season itself has been retroactively tainted. The characters are not the least bit fun or interesting, and there are too many of them to the point that I can't tell who's the glue that's supposed to be holding everything together. The plot moves incredibly slowly, often trying to put in so many plot lines in a single episode at once to the point that it gets in the way of the action and the characterization. ... Japan doesn't really acknowledge the show's existence anymore despite it being so popular back in the day, not helped by the shitty animation. And the story itself is dull as sin, with its commentary on social media being shallower than a celebrity marriage, and its twisted takes on love coming off as incredibly gimmicky. I mean what exactly is it about anyways? That fucked up people can love too? Is that all you've got? Well it's apparently all the final season's got, because that's pretty much the entire basis for this twelve-episode of romp of boring.

So I'd recap the plot of Durarara at this point, but I don't want this review to be longer than a Michael Crichton novel, so let's just say that after that agonizingly bad cliffhanger from last season, some of the characters are trying to figure out how to deal with Nebula (the company that wants Celty's head), some of them are trying to deal with the gang war stuff that only still exists for the same reason Bleach lasted for so long, and Izaya is doing his own thing whilst having absolutely no significant influence on what's going on whatsoever despite the show making giant claims that he is. Durarara!!x2 Ketsu is dead set on resolving all these plot points considering this is the final season, and anyone who's expecting some grand finale should be prepared for a giant letdown, because without spoiling anything in particular, the finale just sort of "happens".

Seriously, if you can't see what's wrong with this conclusion to what once shone so brightly, then you have more tolerance for this show's bullshit than I did with Crimson Moon - and believe me, I (sort of) stood with it up until Seimei left Raikou to his own devices. On the rare occasion that a light novel adaptation ever actually reaches a conclusion, more often than not, it feels like the author is paying obligation to the fans rather than creating the vision he wanted. And why would you want to pay obligation to fans? Don't you know that there's no human being more evil, more hypocritical, and more impossible to satisfy than the fanboy? I mean I used to like this show back in the day, and guess what I think of it now? Agonizingly dull is too nice an opinion at this point, but it's an effective way to sum up my feelings nevertheless.

Now this review is going to be really difficult to do without spoilers considering how character-dependent Durarara's narrative is, but even though I'm sure only die-hard fans of the show care about its existence at this point, that's still a lot of people so I'll do my best. Basically, Durarara's previous problems that have become even more obvious since its return haven't gone anywhere. The animation is still horrible - although nowhere near as bad as it used to be. The action is still shit, bar one fight scene between Masaomi and Chikage that was actually pretty exciting to watch even if the end to it was kinda lame. The pacing is still horrid, most particularly during the final fight between Izaya and Shizuo, which takes almost half the series to resolve itself on account of the show constantly interrupting it to focus on other plotlines. And the opening is even worse than the last one, which I didn't think was possible.

You remember the Yellow Scarves arc from the first season and how one of its biggest problems was that the main villain spearheading that conflict was lamer than current-day Simpsons? Well Ketsu's downplaying of all the big wigs and having that teacher from the Slashers' arc spearhead the Saika zombie invasion that makes up the majority of this lackluster finale makes it clear that the creators have a different opinion of how to do conflict than the audience does. It doesn't even make sense in his case since he was all but absent after that second arc and now suddenly he's a big shot over Yadogiri Jinnai, the Russians, the Nebula company, and fucking Izaya? That's like making the final villain in the original Star Wars trilogy that one guy who harassed Luke in the bar before Old Ben had to cut his arm off.

Oh, and if you think that being near the conclusion of this overly-long journey would mean dialing down all the exposition the characters spout out just to have an episode end on a certain cliffhanger, prepare yourself for a giant letdown. Dear god, doesn't this anime know a thing about "show don't tell?" Was there really something so profound about Anri giving a speech about how she's learned to love even though she's a monster that you had to drag it out for over ten minutes? Ten minutes that could have been spent on animating more action or something actually resembling plot progression. Clannad didn't move this slow. Sword Art Online didn't move this slow. Kaiji didn't...okay wait, that's still one of the slowest anime I've ever seen, so never mind.

I could continue listing everything wrong with this season - particularly the fact that the conclusion itself is once again an anticlimax that's only slightly better than usual - but basically every problem with Durarara's return boils down to three words: extremely too late. By the time it arrived to quench fanboys' thirst, so many anime have come out that surpassed it in everything it tries to do, from stories involving multiple characters to fujoshi-pleasing fanservice, that it has nothing to add to the mixture. Hell, it was surpassed way back when with Paranoia Agent all the way in 2003. It's not funny. It's not engaging. It's milked to oblivion despite losing its main target audience. Its return had all the impact of releasing the air from a balloon and watching it fart all around you whilst you stare at the ceiling.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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	Poll: Durarara!!x2 Ketsu Episode 12 Discussion ( 1 2 3 4 5 ... Last Page ) Stark700 - Mar 26, 2016	262 replies	by Randomega »» Sep 3, 9:37 PM
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