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Alright, so I'm one of those LN readers, but I'll try to keep that aspect out of the review since there are a lot of non LN readers watching this show. But due to being a LN reader, I probably have a more in-depth understanding of the anime... anyway, let's start!

Story: 7/10
It's a decent story. MC gets kicked of the team/ retired from the company he was in. Goes and transfers in a new account. Rebuilds a new character in-game, gathers up a new team, astonishes a bunch of people and rise back to the top. Something I liked about the anime was that it ... was a MMORPG gaming show without the whole "stuck-in-the-world" aspect, making it refreshing. Moreover, it has cool action scenes and finds a nice balance between Real life and Gaming.

Art: 8/10
Pretty slick animation, not just for a chinese anime, but for anime in general. The lighting kind of reminds me of Fate/Zero. A few frames were re-used in the first 5 episodes but it gets better later on. I take in-game repeated frames as the people using the same skills. The character design looks a bit weird- they look younger than I expected and some are not quite as distinct designs as others. The CGI background people are also a problem. Overall though, the art is very nice.

Sound: 7/10
The music is alright. Nothing too impressive, not terrible either.
I applaud the VA for doing a good job voice acting. Most of them sound pretty natural. Compared to other Chinese anime, this show has excellent voice acting! Also, I was told that the characters don't sound very emotional. I think they usually sound like normal Chinese people. The show doesn't tend to exaggerate voices like many Japanese shows do, so maybe people are just accustomed to JP over exaggerating voices? The Chinese language was not a problem for me and I was told that many viewers got used to it soon enough.

Characters: 8/10
Characters are both the strong and weak points of the show. On one end, the villains are portrayed as rather one dimensional in the anime. On the other end, I love the characterization of Ye Xiu and other veteran pro players as well as new players on his team. The MC is a troll and a God-tier player. OP. So OP. If you want a weak MC this is not for you. He is intelligent, strategic, and he's not a stupid teenage boy. His interactions with other gamers are the best and super shameless and he bargains with them to gain the materials needed to level up his umbrella weapon. The females of the show are alright. I find the manager a bit thick and annoying but Su Mucheng (blond girl) is nice and so is the stubborn Tang Rou (short hair). Many have their eyes set on Huang Shao Tian, a super talkative but skilled trashtalker, and Steam Bun Invasion, an oblivious trashtalker who's very fun. Both would be annoying in real life but fans love them. Also, Wang Jie xi, wizard pro, showed up in the latest episode and he's quite good too. Important characters have distinct and lovable personalities that balances out the blandness of the company leaders and other villains.

Enjoyment: 9/10
I really enjoyed the anime despite how much it cut out from the novel. It's at episode 7 but it has the content of chapter 120+ in the novel. Otherwise it's awesome to see the fights animated and adding to the awesome characters is the bits of humors that are pretty funny, mostly from Ye Xiu's shamelessness.

Overall: 8/10
Despite my personal enjoyment, I'm rating it 8/10 because there are many holes that came from the anime showing but not telling enough to the viewers. Cutting so much novel material also made it a problem. However, the animation is top notch and the characters are great! The series has gotten more enjoyable as it goes on and I hope you'll give it a chance!

Alright, so there is surprisingly less reviews for Blue Exorcist the manga than I expected. Seeing as most reviews came from people who've read up to chapter 30 or 40, years ago, I decided to give this a try.

I'm one of those people who've watched the anime first and I watched it a while ago. I tried the manga afterwards but only recently got invested into reading the whole thing. So this is my opinion after reading up to chapter 88 of the manga. I will try to spoil as little as possible in this review, so I'll have to leave off ranting about some ... of my favorite characters in here.

I'll start with personal enjoyment. I personally loved this manga. I thought the anime was decent, but didn't expect much out of the manga. Yes, some characters annoyed me and the narrative slows down in some places. Yes there were several cliches in here. Overall though, I'd give it a 9 for enjoyment because after I got into it, I couldn't stop till I've read all the chapters. That was around chapter 50 I think.

The story starts off pretty much a cliche. Parent figure dies, MC swears to become stronger and beat up what killed the parent figure. Drama between siblings (and this still persists.) and MC goes to a magical school to become stronger! While this seems like the generic shounen, the plot gradually thickens. A lot of stuff comes to light in the recent chapters about the Blue Night and demons. It's not as simple as I thought it was. While still retaining some lighthearted parts, the manga gets a lot darker after the anime veers off.
I'm giving the story 8/10 because it still had a pretty generic beginning and the rescue the damsel trope does get repeated a bit which gets annoying.

The art is really good. It's usually very crisp and detailed. A lot of the characters are distinct. The colored spreads are also beautiful. It portrays disgusting stuff as... very disgusting (You'll see what I mean when you get there). The only complaint I have about the art is how sketchy it gets during some action scenes. I'm not sure if the author ran out of time or if it's done on purpose. Either way, being the only bad thing I found of the art, I'm giving this section a 9/10.

Getting to the final section of this review, the characters! There are many lovable characters in Blue Exorcist. The main character, Okumura Rin, is kind of the generic shounen MC, but sometimes proves to have more insight and depth than you'd expect. He cares a lot about his twin, Okumura Yukio, but part of the conflict of the series stems from the tension between them. You can say that Rin wants to surpass Yukio, but Yukio sees Rin as the stronger one and has an inferiority complex in a way, that is aggravated by the different characters he meets later on. They are both lovable in their own ways though, and it is hard to believe that the MC is the older twin because of how hyper and childish he acts compared to the more solemn and composed Yukio.

Minor character-wise, there are quite a few female characters in the manga, though male still takes the majority. Out of these female characters, I'd say Shura is my favorite because she is pretty badass. The females have the potential to be strong, but as previous reviews say, there are characters like Shiemi that can be strong but acts weak and always has to get saved by people. She does grow a bit more bold later on, but I still don't like her very much. Izumo is the tsundere of the series and also annoys me, but not to a huge extent.
I am not sexist but for this manga, my favorite characters are all male. I like some of the more eccentric characters in the manga, from the Demon Headmaster Mephisto who holds the strings of many unexpected puppets in the manga, to the probably sociopathic Lightning who shows up a lot later in the series. I like the different world view the manga presents us, from the more naive students, to more cynical students, through the manipulation of Mephisto and the carefree view of some other characters...

For the characters, I would have given an 9, but the damsel in distress thing puts it down to 8/10.

Overall, I think this series deserves a 9 for the ratings. There is still room for improvement in the future and the plot of the story is still thick! Now if only it had more frequent updates than the current monthly ones...

Hope this helped!

This is my first review and I'm not really sure how to write this but ill try to...
I should say this first: Towa no quon, despite the pretty good character design, art, and action scenes, did not reach my expectations.
The story was the usual cliche: powerful boy tries to save everyone from bad guys. There weren't anything unexpected for me.
The art was pretty nice, the characters looked great, the amusement park looked cool. So not much criticism on that one.
I didn't have the sound on, so I can't comment on it.
The characters were the worst of the lot. They, especially Quon, looked good but the ... personalities were just dull. Especially Quon. I read another review that said all Quon says is "I want to save everyone." Watched the anime. So true. The whole "saving people thing" was about 50% of all he says. "I want to save everyone." "I want to save her." "I did this because I want to save everyone." He should have more personality and say something MORE INTERESTING. At least he isn't a total weakling. The other characters were nothing memorable so I don't really care.
For some reason, despite all these critics, I actually enjoyed some parts in it, like the action scenes and the last ten minutes of it. However, there are definitively better animes to watch than this one.
So in the end, I rated this a 7/10 due to character design, action, and art.