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It's an anime about a high school girl, known solely by her last name, Koizumi, who lives and breathes consuming endless amounts of ramen while infecting those around her with a light ramen fever as well.
The show advertises the vast variety and depth of ramen and works similar to mukbangs, stimulating the viewer's appetite and it works well as an accompaniment while eating by your lonesome.
The OST is catchy and the food is enticing, but the problem is Ozawa Yuu who's like a fly in that soup noodle dish.
Over time, the parasocial relationship Yuu has with Koizumi has reached a high that you can no ... longer ignore and feel concern over the ramen-loving girl's safety.
Despite Yuu saying in her mind that she adamantly wants to be Koizumi's friend, it often reaches perverse levels of wanting to see her skin and going as far as fantasizing about them both at a wedding venue. She seems dangerous enough to be a danger to her own family members and friends who have begun to take either an interest or gotten naturally close to her target. Often enough, you'd see her throwing dangerous stares at those who have gotten closer to her or may or may have not taken an interest in her as a person.
Not sure what the anime wanted to convey with this and if you'd count out the blue-haired psycho, it'd be an easygoing iyashi-kei foodie anime. Maybe there was a peak in parasocial behavior among teens?
Lol, IDK, it's weird and random to have Yuu go full cray cray like that.
In the beginning, you could maybe still laugh it off, but gradually, the editing wants you to take her craziness more seriously and the show ends with both doing their own thing, Koizumi being the ramen-loving blackhole and Yuu who's relentlessly and endlessly observing and harassing her and her friends expressing light concern over her obsession.

As a horror/supernatural anime, it falls in both aspects.
The horror is mediocre fluff (audio SFX & soundtracks, visual mood settings) and the protagonist's terrified expression has already become the default by episode 2 as he scares easily. There's no real sense of danger or tension regarding the supernatural as Yayoi can easily secure the scene, she's the ultimate safety net.
Yayoi's apathetic demeanor and Eiko's cheery nonchalance have to be the most chilling part of the series. Overall though, it's more mysterious than spooky, intriguing but not as nearly terrifying as advertised in the trailers.
Horror, gore, and the supernatural merely play the role of tools to ... highlight the characters and their journey, vaguely touched on at all in detail or broached way too soon, spoiling the fun.
So do I recommend Dark Gathering based on the main genre being horror/supernatural? No.
If you feel the characters are intriguing enough, it's possibly entertaining.

It's catered more to the customer base who have experienced the eroge that the anime's based on since the story took little to no time to introduce the characters or elaborate in any way further than surface level on their relationship or the attraction the girls have for the protagonist.
The protagonist status of the main character is painfully obvious when every side character and harem member is calling out for his name and attention despite a strong lack of personality. Rather, he's got more flaws than merits.
In comparison, his sole male friend, the comedic relief who gets beaten up most of the time during his ... screen time, sees things more maturely and clearly than he does yet remains all that he is, as a comedic relief.
The harem members are extremely cliché with the exception of the quirky one.
I get the idea of the anime aiming for a coming-of-age sentimental angle, but it fails to deliver when you cannot relate or connect to any of the characters.
If it was aimed at new potential customers for the game, it still flops, because these girls have 0 personality aside from their cliché build-in trope of -deres.
Animation is passable, OST is forgettable.

It's one of the "Damn, I've seen/read the novel/manga version and this didn't match the expectation" animes.
Maybe it's the budgeting that couldn't fit in all the funny scenes or perhaps it's just poor decision-making on what to alter in general despite it having 20 episodes, but once watching the anime, it definitely cooled my excitement a lot right from the get-go.

The gist of the story is centered around a boy who never outgrew his chunnibyou-phase, but miraculously managed to obtain powers that transcend human limits after his truck-kun isekai to pursue a higher and ultimate version of edge lords.
It's intentionally cringy, that's what makes it ... hilariously amusing to watch but the anime just didn't quite hit the mark for me in this case compared to the other medium.

TL;DR:
If you're new to the story, it definitely wouldn't deserve the score I'm giving out, but if you've read the other mediums, it'll most likely disappoint.

Why? How? How did this even make it past the publishers?

This show's baselines is based on some very popular and old shounen anime/mangas out there with barely a plot on its own; Toriko, One Piece and HxH influences can be seen from the start, intro gives the vibe of both already away, first filler character is a Killua wanna be then later on even an obvious Toriko reference can be seen as a filler character.

Both female and male MC's lore aside, it's more focused on the discovery of the dark nature of humanity that they get to see during their work time WHILE it's ... also sort of squeeze the relevance of our MCs and MCs back stories in. It's trying to get the audience's blood pumping on the premise of adventure and fantasy with adding a poor attempt at seasoning the show with the dark twists. You can hardly get motivated to feel for the main characters, not to mention side characters, due to the confusing attempt of a build up.
It was a 5-6 of a score until it tried to be humorous as well. The MCs suddenly turn into cancerous "It's just a prank, bruh" characters who're tormenting an average hard working man until he resorts to restore some of the damages that the MCs have done to his life but they sort of kept stalking and bullying him for days after days straight for their own conveniences.

TL; DR: It's trying to hard to be too many things it cannot be since all the details have not been worked out properly. Mainly also has no plot because there's nothing happening that gets you pumped for next episode and MC is as pumped about life as your average salary man.

Art and design is mediocre at best, the mentor reminds me of tegami bachi & HxH (radiating the I'm a calm and collected mentor aura), male MC reminds me of the MC from a tennis anime whose catch phrase is "mada mada dane" , there are already so many official references being made based on story, there's really hardly anything original that stands out about their design, and I'm looking hard here to find anything, okay? That goes as well as for the characteristics, it fully radiates the all to very much "I've seen this somewhere" vibe.

Down the line, all of these points together make the show hardly enjoyable and overall since it doesn't make any sense of what it's trying to do here either. The oblivious scenes of trying to gain empathy from the viewers makes me eye roll instead, the fighting scenes are plain paired up with the equally "I've heard this somewhere before" vibe of BGM.

I couldn't watch on anymore after sitting through half of it, but skimped through till the end and the show kept it's consistency of just being purely poorly made. If you would want to give it a go, I'd recommend to watch it with the minimum of expectations one can hold for a show.
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No srsly, how did this make it past the publishers?
And considering it made it's way to animation studios and gets produced by Shueisha it's a big why & how.

From the beginning to the end it was predictable, boring and downright repetitive to what you normally see in the series or extras or OVAs. The theme is pirates with the sentimental of friendship and judging by the movie cover illustration it's focused on Ran & Sonoko. That didn't even turn out to be the focus point it was implied on doing. Mainly another story of "bad guy" taking advantage over brains of the mighty detective but getting played in their own little game (which probably describes MOST story plots). The touching moments with friendship and love was... dim, it was present but to say ... it didn't stand out at all is an understatement.
Also questioning why some characters were even there, it was hardly necessary for them to be present, I think they just put them in there to extend the time of the movie.
And that's just for the story; animation wise, your eyes get attacked by a crowd of 3d models walking on the streets which movements looked horrendous (like a beginner attempting at string puppeteering for the first time). But yeah, bottom line; I've seen more treasure hunting story plots in the anime series that were more exciting and well done than this piece. Hardly enjoyable, they could've done better, but see for yourself.

At the beginning of this anime, I had to come check on MAL for the release date of this show because I found the animation below average, and honestly, plainly bad and something you'd probably see as average from 2007 not 2017.
But then, gee, this anime did a good job punching me in the face for thinking so, from there on each episode which each different vibe and genre freshens up the show which was of course, vastly confusing but in a good way, at least for me. The show kept me interested that bordered my irritation but with still a certain amount of gap ... overall.
Story wise, you sort of get what you expected and then on the next the plot twists in such an absurd way that your brain hurts, if you like logical anime shows then I don't think this is up your alley.
A tremendous thank you goes to the OST and animation, they've both blessed my ears and eyes equally; EXCEPT from the unintentional bad looking first style that was introduced (the character sometimes had a lazy eye, sometimes the perspective looked weird and squished a characters head, that was not constant so I suppose it's not intentional)
Also a huge shout out to Teddyloid's track "Salvation" that's the ending of one of the episodes, I LOVE IT.
There are some plot holes, if you watch it without analyzing it all too much I believe it's something you'd definitely come to like maybe even love. Do not let the first impression scare you off, stay for at least 3 episodes, it'll confuse you, sure, but that's the vibe of this anime! It'll stay confusing until the end!

This review will be purely judged from my point of view (duh) and please take everything I say as just merely as a grain of salt and give it a go yourself to see how good or bad it truly is.

So; Death March, another isekai/other world, harem, mmo oriented anime based on its LN version:
The first episode is promising, it was easy to get into it, necessarily so, if I'd might say, for short 12 episodes. But this is where things start to go downhill, the build up from there on is nonexistent, the "challenges", if you can even call it that, being thrown at ... the protagonist are all easily tackled and faced with a nonchalant manner.
Characters personalities are tolerable, they're not annoying neither do they grow on you, yes, including the protagonist. Furthermore, despite for being already bland, 1 out of protagonist's harem does not even get much screen time and barely any interaction time or attention from protagonist (does make you wonder why the hell she's even there for). The protagonist himself has a lot of Mary Sue issues, overall a gentleman, with decent amounts of chivalry, humanism and rational thinking combined with all the cheat head start he's gotten,no personality or any other sort of flaws, to the point that you can honestly call it boring.

As for character development; there is none and why should there be any if they don't grow from any challenges?
Protagonist faces off any situation without panicking and deals with it in the best possible fashion while benefiting from it...

Soundtrack wise, the opening is okay and ending track is a cutesy song I don't mind have playing in the background frequently, the rest doesn't stand out much, mediocre at best. The voice acting is the same.

The interest in this particular anime just kept dropping ever since episode 4-5, the happenings are just plainly linear and just to be very sure I didn't miss anything or misjudge it, I've sat through the 12 short episodes that felt way longer as time went on. The happenings are random, merely there to introduce more waifus to our protagonist, as for plot related content like why he's been thrown into this world or why what he even is, is not even something the protagonist thinks all too much about himself.

Personally, I'm not a fan of the harem genre, actually, the fan service bits were the best part of this anime. But as for an adventure fantasy anime, it fails in all aspects. The magic, special races or anything other worldly was never properly featured or explained, it's plainly THERE for the sake of it.


TL; DR This is a story of a 30 year old being thrown back to his early teens as an over powered mmorpg character of lvl 310 that could destroy the world, but he's too busy unintentionally picking up all these women that have no special characteristic features except for their individual exterior beauty and cuteness.
But hey, if you're looking for something just to pass time by, something that doesn't sit all too heavy on your stomach and tear glands and can be even played on the second screen while your main focus drifts off to something else because you obviously wouldn't miss much, this anime is definitely for you.

If you're looking for something light and fun, HxH might not be for you because it packs a proper punch in your feels section.
The story is about a young boy (Gon Freecss) going after his father's (Ging Freecss) footsteps to find out the reason why and how his career was so captivating to let him abandon his duty and responsibilities to raise Gon.
Gon sets out from his home to challenge a whole new world, gain amazing trustworthy friends and face many hardships and trials at only a young age of 12.

Even though the story isn't completely finished yet, this is probably one of the most ... satisfying ways to end this anime so no worries about a weird after taste after you're done with HxH. (Can't deny that I'm craving for more though)
I hope the mangaka recovers soon and can finish this masterpiece at his own pace, I'll be definitely waiting for any kind of updates!

The art is simply stunning, what I particularly like is the quirky aura of very special individuals is never repetitive, it is as individual and special like the characters that were created.
Now that I think of it, actually not only art, but sound, character, and the overall enjoyment grows with each arc.
As for the characters, I don't really know how to put it into words without spoiler anything, but I absolutely have at least a handful that grew very dear to me, to the point to make me cry when they do, make me feel sad and smile whenever they're laughing. Even maybe for antagonists, you might find yourself cheering for them before you know, no matter how cruel they are or could be.