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Sometimes you just want to turn off your mind and watch a typical ecchi harem anime. You don’t expect too much of it and just want enough fanservice to get you through your rough day. So when you start watching and see the number of episodes you think “Hmm 24 episodes, isn’t it usually 12? Well then this must have some kind of good plot to be this long.” Then you start it, finish it and wonder why the fuck this was made?!

Story 2/10
I want to say this is just a typical ecchi harem show with some action, but it isn’t. Aside from the large ... cast of girls to fit different fetishes and the plain main character that everyone falls for along with the occasional panty shot and the mc getting hit for walking in on them or doing something indecent which isn’t even their fault, it isn’t really like your typical ecchi harem show.
The plot of the show is well… there is no plot. It starts off with our bland OP protagonist who is one of the strongest beings in the world, so they have a little girl oversee him to see if he should be disposed of or not. Initially I thought the organization sending her had some underlying goal in mind, since there is no way they would send a 14(?) year old to handle one of the 4 strongest beings in the world with one of their strongest weapons, but yeah no they actually did that…
3 months prior to the show MC was just a normal guy, but got vampiric powers from the previous strongest vampire. They add a little mystery to that, by not telling us exactly what happened. But they never tell us anything about it because fuck you go read the light novel. In 24 episodes they tell you nothing about the only plot line in this show. The whole show is basically just some episodic arcs with one arc having an event from another arc that the show doesn’t cover so it ends with having some loose ends.
The story has a lot of supernatural beings in it, since the location of where the story takes place is a city full of supernatural creatures that have been “tamed” as in they have a collar, look like humans and the collar goes off when they transform and use magic, but the show never does anything with this.
Since it’s an ecchi, school harem show, you expect it to have that as the main vocal point. But while watching it, I didn’t really feel like that was the main focus of the story. I didn’t really feel like it was just trying to be an ecchi show with a stupid plot put into it. It had quite a few moments where it felt like it wanted to be taken seriously which made me question what they wanted to convey in this story. Did it try to convey that humans are the actual monsters instead of the supernatural creatures? Nope that was never mentioned like I said they didn’t really do anything with it. Well then does it try to show how monsters and humans can live together? Well they do live side by side, but the show doesn’t really make it 100% clear if everyone is aware of that. Even if they are tamed there are so many explosions in the city and shit happening that I wouldn’t know why anyone would want to live here. Well maybe it was about the mc’s friends accepting him as a supernatural creature. Although he mentions telling his friends and it’s frequently asked what is really happening there is always something happening just so he won’t have to tell them for the convenience of the plot. Actually not even convenience, since the story would probably work better if he just tells them. There really is no need to hide this especially for 24 episodes. Same thing for the romance in his harem. Every time there was some progression it’s immediately stopped by having something random happening. For example one of the characters say “I’ll explain what this kiss means on Saturday”. Saturday comes, now I’m stuck on this inhabited island and we’ll never talk about this plot line again. Aside from the fact that it’s stupid that this needs to be explained, it has some real flip the table moments for this. If it wasn’t already obvious for everyone in the beginning, the last episode already tells you who the mc will end up with.
Speaking of the last episode, well it just kind of ended. It was not a bad ending or anything it was just, well, there is more, but you need to read the source material.
The only thing I really enjoyed about the show were the ecchi moments and the occasional good comedy that made me chuckle.

Characters 3/10
Oh boy, well if you thought the story was bad, the characters are also quite bad. Not as bad as the story, but still pretty bad.
Kojou (mc): He is your typical nice guy, he says the typical nice things which instantly makes the girls uncontrollably wet, shaking their legs and drooling with lust because which girl wouldn’t if you tell her she looks good in that piece of clothing. Though seriously they all just fall for him for reasons I’ll list in a few moment. Like I previously mentioned he’s an op vampire, although he’s only op at the very last moment of every fight. It basically goes like this they fight the villain, Kojou is useless, Himeragi (the other mc) is holding her own, but they can’t defeat the villain so Kojou needs to get a power up, but he can’t get the power up because his familiars don’t see him as their master yet, because he hasn’t drank any blood. So obviously instead of just cutting the hand of the girl and drinking the blood, he needs to get excited, so the girls OBVIOUSLY need to undress, make out and then he can drink their blood (note that although I’m saying this very sarcastically these were the only real moments I enjoyed). He then gets his power up and defeats the villain. Now note that his power up becomes completely useless against the next villain because every fucking familiar only works on the specific villain that he needs to face at that time, because you know plot convenience.
On to the other characters we have:
Himeragi: The girl who will beat up Kojou for perverted things that weren’t even his fault. She’s also a good fighter who can hold her own. Initially she seemed to be one of the only 2 characters who weren’t bland, but her personality basically stays the same throughout the show just like all the other characters and besides holding her own in a fight, I don’t really see any real personality traits.
Asagi: The blond (Best) girl who’s the only one with a sort of personality and actually tries to further her romance, which makes you root for her, but because of plot convenience that progression comes to a halt and we all know that the best girl never ends up with MC (so fuck!!!!!).
Little sister: She is in there because we need a cute sister. She has a “tragic” backstory for one scene, but this is never really expanded upon, so you can forget about it since her being in the show wouldn’t have made any difference. Also one of the very few girls that don’t want to fuck Kojou. (No incestual she’s actually not blood related moments here. Surprising honestly).
Loli teacher: Because we need a loli teacher. She’s competent in fighting whenever the plot needs her to be and is very serious. She is also not interested in Kojou (as far as I can tell).
Tsundere girl: The ponytail girl who likes Kojou, but can’t admit it. She has some cute moments and surprisingly doesn’t come in between the relationship of the other (on purpose).
Nice princess(?) girl: Who just wants to make advances on Kojou because???
Childhood friend: because we need a childhood friend and she likes Kojou because he’s her childhood friend. I know that doesn’t make any sense, but just go with it.
There are 4 other sort of important side characters, but we don’t care about them. To sum it up, there is a maid girl with no personality, the sort of oni-chan girl, the gay OP guy who only fights when it’s convenient for the plot and that other male character that seemed important, but wasn’t really.
The villains were your typical villain of the week spread out over 3-4 episodes. They weren’t memorable in the least. Sure they had some motives, but they were all really forgettable, hell they weren’t even threatening. There was not one time I felt like any of the characters where in any real danger, I don’t mean in a plot armor kind of way, but there was just no tension in the fights. Sure there were some close calls, but you always knew it wasn’t the end for them.
Overall none of the characters where really interesting or had any real development except for the best girl, Asagi. But at least all the girls were really cute and none of them were annoying well except for Himeragi when she hits Kojou for no reason. Especially when it’s not even a misunderstanding…

Animation 6/10
The animation was pretty solid overall, especially the fight scenes even though the fight’s became pretty repetitive over time, but that doesn’t have anything to do with the animation which they did a pretty good job on. Like I mentioned before the girls were also really cute so ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) I mean uhm the art style is really nice, though girls tend to look a bit similar apart from hair style.

Sound 6/10
I honestly don’t recall any ost aside from the song at the end of a fight and I can’t be bothered to listen to the ost, so I’ll just judge it mostly on the opening and ending which were both pretty good. The 2nd opening actually made the series seem better than it was.

Enjoyment 4/10
As you could probably tell, I did not enjoy this anime very much. I went into this expecting this to be just a popcorn ecchi flick that would be 12 episodes, but instead I got THIS thing that for some reason exists and recently even got 2 ova’s. That actually had the ecchiness I was searching for.

Overall 4/10
I feel like this series just lacks a plot, it could have been something more if it actually used its plot elements, expanded on the world and actually tried to do something original with it. The best thing about this show is the stereotypes and ecchi scenes which is obviously not a good thing. It’s definatly not the worst thing I’ve seen, but it could’ve been a lot better. I wouldn’t really recommend this show to anyone you’re better of watching dxd or testament.

Akame ga kill Review

Story
The story starts off with our hero Tatsumi. A country boy from a poor village who sets out with his two friends to join the capitals military so they can send back money to their poor village. While traveling to the capital they get attacked by a group of bandits and are separated. Tatsumi reaches the capital alone, but immediately gets scammed and is left homeless. But luckily a sweet young lady spots him and invites him to stay at her place for the night. But things quickly take a turn for the worst when a group of assassin’s know as night ... raid who possess special super weapons know as imperial arms or teigu attack. One of the members is the woman who scammed him and because she feels like she owes him saves him from dead and reveal that the noble young lady and her family are actually sadistic psychopaths. He sees one of his friends hanging dead from torture and the other one barely alive. He immediately kills the woman. And his other friend dies in his arms. Although this ending to episode 1 was done purely for shock value to make the viewers want to watch the next episode I didn’t really mind that, but what happens afterwards I do mind. It’s one of the shows major flaws. Transitioning between seriousness and comedy. Immediately after his friend dies in his arms he literally gets pulled by night raid and is forced to join them in a comedic fashion and were supposed to laugh. I don’t know about you but when I’m sad I’m not in the mood to laugh. It’s just common sense and it isn’t done very well. If not for that moment this first episode could’ve been a great start.
The show relies heavily on shock value, blood and violence to keep the viewers interested which I don’t mind I’m all for mindless fun, but the problem I had with this one was that it takes itself way too serious. Which makes it hard to just enjoy. It tries really hard to emphasis the darkness off the capital. But it does it so much that you just want them to stop. We get it the capital is evil, there is no hope, there is no salvation everything is bad. The problem with the darkness of the capital is that the evil is just too black and white making the capital really shallow. And the way they show it isn’t really done that well either most of the time it’s just people getting killed. We don’t really see the people suffering that much we don’t really get to see how bad it is only that people die in horrible ways not saying that isn’t bad, but it could be more than that. The show also doesn’t really give you a valid reason to actually take it seriously. For example they skinn people alive. Behead them while begging for mercy to show that this show is dark and mature while it’s only there to serve as shock value while not adding anything to the story. There really isn’t any reason for it to be in there beyond that. (The manga is an even worse offender of that with rape clowns and kids getting there limps broken and raped by dogs. I seriously think there is something wrong with the writer).
As most of you probably know there are a looooooot of deaths in this show. Which I really like because when everyone can die it makes every fight much more exciting. Although the last nigh raid dead felt really unnecessary. (it was just killing a character for the sake of killing a character). But It was actually done in a pretty good way. I just loved that no one had plot armor, but it also made it hard to care about characters since you knew that their probability of surviving the end of the show was basically 50-50.
Now to the part which most people even manga fans didn’t like about this series was the last filler episodes starting from epi 20-24 (and well part of 19 if you want). Although I’d say that epi 20 and 21 weren’t anything really special I did think it was very much in the style of akame ga kill and the episodes themselves weren’t that bad at all. The episodes 22-24 were actually the best episodes of the whole series. I was a bit skeptical at episode 22 because the series didn’t really have a clear indication as to where it was going with its final, but it actually did it in a very good and surprisingly akame ga kill way.
The reason I think the filler episodes were the best episodes of the entire show was because I think
the director actually knew more about what akame ga kill was then the actual mangaka. Just simple bloody fun. It be better if the series itself knew that. If it actually wanted to be something more it could done something with maybe the cliché of evil fighting evil. Now onto the reason why I think most people hated the ending was (minor spoiler) that almost everyone died. But let’s be honest here did you really think akame ga kill was going to end with everyone living happily ever after? I’m pretty sure the manga is going to end very similarly. One more thing I want to mention is the suspension of disbelieve. In anime there are a lot of things you just need to accept, like there being teenage boys saving the world, there being magic and mystical creatures. But when we have someone with a gun in there fucking mouth it raises so many questions for example how does that person eat, how the fuck can she even breath and how do you even reload etc. and then we also have the gun hand in case someone conveniently slices of your arms just at the right spot so you can use the guns installed in your arms. There is even more they added to this character but I digress.

Characters
The main cast consist of the night raid members, the jaegers and honest (just a one dimensional douchebag don’t really need to know anything more about him). The night raid members are also all pretty one dimensional. They all have one unique trait like drinking, loving meat, being clumsy at everything etc. and there isn’t much more to them. They all have a ‘’sad’’ backstory, but the backstory’s are really rushed and feel more like an insincere summary of why they will keep on fighting no matter what. Backstory’s are supposed to make sympathize with the characters and are supposed to give the character some more depth to them, but here they are just a quick summary and it just feels like it’s kind of there without adding anything. It’s portrayed in a way that shows they put no effort into it and that’s a real shame because when people keep dying one after another (And they will) you just don’t care. The only 2 characters who get a bit of development are Mine and Tatsumi. The good thing I can say about Tatsumi is that he’s an above average shounen hero since unlike other shounen protagonist he isn’t as naïve. Like for example he won’t just say that he’ll protect the girls of night raid just because they’re girls and can’t protect themselves, he believes in them and the consequences of him believing in them are shown (not in an attack on titan bad way). The villains are all pretty one dimension psychopath who have no redeemable traits. The only noteworthy villains are the jeagers. The group meant to hunt down nightraid. Unlike the other villains they actually have a layer of depth to them and are actually more likeable than night raid. I’d like to go more in-depth into the Jeagers since they are easily the most likeable characters in this show, but this review is already pretty long, so I’ll just wrap this section up. What I did like about the characters is that in the end whether they were good or bad when they died they stayed true to their convictions. Now what I don’t necessarily considered a flaw, but think could’ve given the characters especially the one from night raid a little depth is if they made the brutal killings actually effect the characters and give them some moral choices and make them actually change the characters instead of the mindless blood spilling.

Animation
The animation was done by studio white fox who have also done the animation for steins gate and the devil is a part-timer and for most part the animation was consistently good, but nothing really impressive. The battle scene’s weren’t always that well animated and it has this annoying thing that I’m just going to call still frame where they stop the animation and make it look real? It was really out of place and annoying and it happened in (Almost) every episode. The last episodes is probably where they spend most of their budget because those episodes where really well animated the battles looked very smooth and overall it was just really well done.The show is really bloody with a lot of gore so I’m at least glad they did the censoring to a minimum.

Sound
the ost wasn’t anything noteworthy, I don’t even remember some of the songs actually being used, but The ones that I did remember weren’t bad but they weren’t good either they were just okay. The two opening both fit the show really well and I don’t really have anything else to say about them.

Enjoyment
In the end what it all comes down to is did I enjoy this anime? And the answer to that is surprisingly yes. The show was fun. Sure it had a lot of issues and the show took itself way to seriously, but I did enjoy watching it. It wasn’t anything amazing or something I haven’t seen before, but it was just some mindless bloody fun.
If you’re wondering why even though this series isn’t that good especially critically it’s pretty popular it’s probably because it looks like a mature shounen where everyone can be killed. But for me it’s more so because it reminded me of a similar story that I wanted to write in the past.

The score
Story: 4
Animation: 5
sound: 5
Characters: 5
Enjoyment

With the final score being a 5,2 meaning average and me recommending you to not watch it unless you want to watch a show with a lot of deaths and blood.

If you liked this show and you want to watch something similar I’d recommend attack on titan and Tokyo Ghoul. They are both bloody series and actually more mature shounen. Although the Tokyo ghoul anime is pretty rushed.

For those who’ve not seen it it’s available on crunchyroll and if you really liked it and want to own the physical copy sentai filmworks has liscensed it so it will be available sometime in the future.