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First of all, NO SPOILERS CONTAINED IN THIS REVIEW!
Secondly, I want to inform you that I will not talk about how well-made the story is, about the character development, the sound or the art. I'll try to write a ''unique'' review of how it would be (or how we would like it to be) if we had a life like the characters of this anime. Please read until the end. Thank you. :)
(Sorry for any grammar mistake)

There are so many reasons why I love Durarara very much, but the most significant is that this anime is like how I would like my life to ... be.

Everyone would love to have an adventure life like they're inside an anime.
Everyone would like to have super powers like Ichigo, Luffy, Naruto, Natsu, Tsuna etc. have.
But in a second thought, being someone like these characters would mean a tense life. So, this ''dream'' will be abandoned.

Durarara serves a slice of life story in a big crowded city like almost all of us live in one.
The characters seem to be just ordinary students/citizens with a normal life.
But that's when the best part comes!
The characters as ordinary as they may seem, are actually something more than this. Each one of them has a ''dark'' (I'd rather call it unique, instead) personality other than their normal one. Some of them are members of mafia, others are independents, but still very strong. Others are neither mafia members nor do they have insane powers such as super powers or physical powers that not a normal human would ever have, but still play an important role in some cases. This kind of characters usually step into various adventures that we all would like to have. I'm sure that all of you have at least once thought to have a second personality that only you and people that are not in your milieu know (or at least your best friend knows, too) and try to keep it secret. And you're in close call with these people or even fight them if they're ''bad'' guys either directly or indirectly. And to make it more interesting, let's add a bit of supernatural, too. Legends that are known to exist until now that have been seen by some people, but hardly ever, like a headless rider or very rarely humans that have a super power (not as fancy as to have a bankai or to be a rubberman) that makes them like having ''pulled out'' from a movie, and these people are among us, and when the time comes to witness this living legend out of nowhere, even for an instant, makes us feel like being inside a fairytale ourselves.

This is the life we all dream about to have. Not a life as tense as the most main characters have (like Ichigo, Luffy, Naruto etc as I mentioned before), but still a life that can satisfy us. An ordinary life in big city full of adventures and mysterious events.

This is the main reason why I love Durarara so much!

**Note: This review contains a few mild spoilers and some hints about the series. If you’d like to go in completely unspoiled, you can just skip to the “Overall” section at the end.

Story – 8.5/10

At what price comes security? The people of Japan in Psycho-Pass have willingly given up many freedoms for what appears at the outset to be a perfect system: impartial machines, run by the centralized Sibyl System, judge the psychological wellness of every citizen, assigning a “hue” to their mental make-up and a number to their “crime coefficient,” a measure of how likely they are to commit violent criminal acts. Individuals with ... a cloudy hue and a high crime coefficient are incarcerated and treated, or—if their number is high enough—killed. Some latent criminals are selected to become Enforcers, working under Inspectors who use their criminal knowledge to track down dangerous psychopaths. Meanwhile, regular citizens live with a feeling of complete safety, and have their futures set in stone by the Sibyl system, which can assess which jobs they would be best suited for.

One of Psycho-Pass’s greatest victories is its ability to portray both sides of this world. On the one hand, most citizens largely accept the system as-is, given the safety they feel and the extent to which Sibyl’s ideology has seeped into their everyday lives; on the other hand, the show wastes almost no time before it begins to critique this system. Many characters voice concerns about the dystopic and totalitarian elements of Sibyl, including and especially the main character, Akane, and the antagonist, Makishima. This is a series fully invested in exploring the ethical and moral ramifications of the society it depicts, which certainly elevates the story itself above what you might expect from what is ostensibly an action series.

Frequent references to philosophers—Michel Foucault even gets name-dropped at one point, speaking about (what else) the panopticon—raise this subtext into text, and that the villain of the series is consciously working to subvert the Sibyl system allows for theme to marry plot, action, and character in a way that is more or less seamless, even if most of the questions it raises go unanswered. Still, that’s not necessarily a bad thing: for a series as much concerned with “big ideas” as it is with action and character, it makes sense not to resolve those ideas, which are after all largely unresolverable anyway. It’s enough that the story of Psycho-Pass does an excellent, if ultimately imperfect, job of examining philosophical debates through the actions of its characters and its extremely well though-out dystopic world.

All of this means that it’s difficult to separate plot from theme here, which is one reason why the extent to which you’re able to buy into some of the mid-season twists will ultimately depend, at least in part, on how invested you are in the philosophical underpinnings of the series. To me, the twists make sense from that perspective, and add new wrinkles to the ideas being examined in the series; even a certain character's decisions near the end, which grow somewhat questionable, make sense if viewed from the right direction. It’s not always completely satisfying, but I can’t say the ending was anticlimactic; indeed, I can’t think of a much more fitting end given the questions being asked here. That having been said, I also can’t help but feel as though some characters’ personalities and actions were dictated by those questions, rather than the other way around. In the end I found the story engrossing and justifiable, but just know going in that you might not end up feeling the same way!

Animation – 8/10

Great animation! The best quality is the world the designers have cooked up, which feels lived-in and which a friend of mine compared—quite rightly, I think—to Blade Runner. The Dominators, powerful multi-purpose guns used by Inspectors and Enforcers, are extremely badass. Character designs are nothing particularly special, but at least (most of) the women aren’t too fanservicey!

Sound – 8.5/10

The soundtrack is generally pretty fabulous, and I even got a few of the musical cues stuck in my head (humming one right now, in fact). I watched the dub and I found it to be generally quite impressive—no voice stuck out at me as particularly awful. I found Robert McCollum (Kougami) and Alex Organ (Makishima) to be most impressive, with both actors finding the right balance in characters that were complex and oftentimes contradictory. Organ perhaps deserves special kudos for not turning Makishima into your standard self-righteous pontificating villain trope. Sound effects are generally quite good and often very gruesome; this is as good a place as any to warn you that this series isn’t for the faint of heart!

Characters -- 8.5/10

The characters here are generally well-developed and intriguing, with Kougami and Makishima being the obvious standouts. I also appreciate the series’ commitment to interesting and complex female characters (the show passes the Bechdel test by episode 2, if I’m not mistaken), including the protagonist, Akane Tsunemori, whose undergoes perhaps the most drastic and welcome character arc of the series (the only real challenger to that title is a character whose name I won’t reveal, to preserve the surprise of where he/she ends up). The series even has some good LGBT representation, a welcome surprise!

Overall – 8.5/10

I really enjoyed Psycho-Pass, from the animation to the characters to the great story. If nothing else, it's a great action series, a great detective story, and has enough philosophical bite to give you something to chew on after it’s done. I’d say if you’re on the fence, go ahead and take the plunge.