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This may well be a bit of a biased review since this is the first anime I have ever watched and it may well remain one of my favorites even after I stop re-watching it. I'm sure any of you even moderately familiar with the sci-fi scene has heard about the infamous downfall of Firefly, a really great T.V series that got cut down in it's prime. Twelve Kingdoms unfortunately suffered the same fate which is why I gave the story a lower score than I would. The story telling itself is brilliant but it just ends up making you shake your fist at the ... creator for letting it die before it could fully express itself.

The sound is about as fine as you can get for an anime and I actually quite liked the soundtrack, very little to complain about here.

The artwork is your typical anime stuff, nothing overly impressive and neither is the animation, in fact it seems to do that typical thing that the low budget animes do when trying to do huge scenes where they've blatantly copy and pasted their artwork in order to make the battles or they just had stills of the huge battles with sound effects instead of actual animation. This can be quite easily overlooked though because when you get closeup they do a perfectly decent job of the animations and art and you can tell what's going on clearly. With the kind of animation and art quality you end up looking at it does make you wonder if at times they had to cut corners where they could in order to meet the deadlines for the series.

I really liked the characters in this one and in a lot of animes. Even the main character just happily shows off their personality and acts genuinely human instead of the creators hiding it away so they can drag on the anime longer. Overall again, I really have very little complaints the personalities are all unique and varied and even the characters that get killed off have plenty of story behind them.

The story itself is a crazy mix of politics, war, backroom deals and outright human emotion which is EXACTLY what an anime of this nature should be about. One of the main interesting things about the story is the way that even though it is explaining what's happening between the characters. You are not only given a interesting story to follow but there is also that feeling that there is much more going on beyond just the characters being introduced to you. This I feel is the best thing about Twelve Kingdoms and also the best thing I find in all stories of this nature and it is what makes great storytelling.

At first I had never really thought much of anime but was recommended this by a friend. Since then I have basically mined out any decent to awesome anime I could find as it is only in the anime industry have I found such a variety of entertainment. Do not be turned off by the abrupt ending, even though the series was canceled this is well worth a watch just because of the sheer depth in the story.