Darker than Black: Kuro no Keiyakusha

It has been 10 years since Heaven's Gate appeared in South America and Hell's Gate appeared in Japan, veiling the once familiar night sky with an oppressive skyscape. Their purposes unknown, these Gates are spaces in which the very laws of physics are ignored. With the appearance of the Gates emerged Contractors, who, in exchange for their humanity, are granted supernatural abilities.

In the Japanese city surrounding Hell's Gate, Section 4 Chief Misaki Kirihara finds herself at odds with an infamous Contractor codenamed Hei. Called "Black Reaper" in the underground world, Hei, like his associates, undertakes missions for the mysterious and ruthless Syndicate while slowly peeling back the dark layers covering a nefarious plot that threatens the very existence of Contractors.

From the mind of Tensai Okamura comes a sci-fi thriller taking the form of a subtle exposé on a war in which political positions and justice have no sway—a war waged exclusively in the shadows.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Hei Main

Kiuchi, Hidenobu Japanese

Yin Main

Fukuen, Misato Japanese

Mao Main

Sawaki, Ikuya Japanese

Kirihara, Misaki Main

Mizuki, Nana Japanese

Huang Main

Ikeda, Masaru Japanese

Amber Supporting

Kawakami, Tomoko Japanese

November 11 Supporting

Inoue, Kazuhiko Japanese

July Supporting

Asai, Kiyomi Japanese

Havoc Supporting

Shindo, Naomi Japanese

Kurasawa, Gai Supporting

Matsumoto, Yasunori Japanese

Cook, Justin Producer

Harp, Clarine Producer

Maruyama, Hiroo Producer

Oyabu, Yoshihiro Producer

Reviews

Oct 10, 2025

KING3244

Recommended

Darker than Black spuriously is good anime.

the only anime that my expectation was very low for some reasons I did not expect it to be worth my time, but in the end I end up watching the first episode which was ok so i watch the second which lead me in to the end of season one in just two days the anime is great and very masteries with so many secrets and good story that made you continue watch it all this in side and the characters designed are in the over side which made went to know the story of ever characters in ... the anime.

overall, the anime is amazing so if you have a time i recommend you to give it shoot.

Reviewer’s Rating: 9

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Nov 8, 2025

FAKEANIMEGIRL

Mixed Feelings

(Check my profile for a link to my personal site with more up-to-date reviews and bonus media!)

Written October 29, 2016 2:22 am EST
---
Well, I found this pretty boring. A total “less than the sum of its parts” show. I want to show it some base level of respect in that it was an earnest attempt at an anime-original series that at least seemed to have some ambition, but not really the wits to make it into anything of worth. It jams a bunch of interesting ideas into a single space but there’s a lot more to writing than a good premise.

In a nutshell, Darker Than ... Black (DTB) follows a group of four people working for “The Syndicate” (its only given name) who take on various secret missions involving contractors, a group of humans who suddenly awake to having supernatural abilities. There’s also a heavy political thriller overlay with a red tape talk among the police and government, mostly from the perspective of the deuteragonist Misaki Kirahara. The protagonist is Hei, a Syndicate member who’s a contractor himself with the ability to control electricity.

Darker Than Black takes off with little exposition, beginning at the start of nothing in particular as it follows just another one of Hei’s missions. The majority of the setting has to be picked up in context, which is something I prefer at the expense of unnatural dialogue that’s addressing the audience, but none of this effort in deciphering Darker Than Black‘s majorly bloated world ever pays off.

There’s a paranormal mystery here, with the rise of the contractors being started by the sudden appearance of “Gates” several years ago that cause a bunch of unknown phenomena that’s being researched. Most of the time spent elaborating on anything about the gates and contractors ends up being useless because you’re given an explanation of how both work at best but never what any of it means in the story or thematically, nor do you learn anything’s origin. It’s hard to put into words how completely nothing this story ends up being. It literally goes nowhere by the end of the show.

But if the overarching plot isn’t the focus, which makes all the chicken feed details about the Gate and political jurisdiction boring as shit and pointless for not adding to any other finalized elements of the show such as the characters, then you’d at least hope the setting and self-contained stories would be worth the price of involvement. You’d be wrong, though.

Any details or character development regarding our main characters is at the lowest priority and instead most of Darker Than Black is centered on two-part episodic adventures with one-off characters and stories that are derivative, too minor to get attached to, and delivered with a lackluster script with poorly placed comedy and straight character archetypes and listless art direction, animation, and direction.

Every two-parter ends up in excessive melodrama that’s difficult to buy into as minor characters dump their life stories on Hei or whatever, and our main characters are stoic and repetitive to the point that seeing them interact with these new situations isn’t interesting in the way Cowboy Bebop could make it with a more dynamic cast and smoother dialogue. Speaking of, there’s a one-off character in one of the episodes who’s a carbon-copy of one from Cowboy Bebop, both being spirited young guys who get involved with the mob to protect a girl in some way and they keep pestering the main character to teach them their “kung-fu” techniques.

The political drama elements are complete fluff, a lot of whining about international governments and jurisdictions between Kirahara and her crew with very little of this extraneous detail being necessary or interesting. It often feels like episode padding as Kirahara stands around in her office being prattled about the technicalities of her mission. Who fucking cares? You don’t even see a single country other than Japan to understand their perspective.

This rarely effects the big picture or the main characters and these parts don’t offer unique insight on society or give an interesting twist to the setting. It’s just dull procedural red tape being carried about by nobodies far away from where the action is. We don’t need five to ten minutes explaining Kirahara’s mission or why she can’t go into a building because the U.N. or whatever the fuck won’t allow it, goddamn get on with it. Talk about something we actually need to know.

One of the most recurring parts of DTB’s setting is the contractors, something that sounds like it could be impossible not to have some fun with. An interesting idea about contractors is that each one has a “price” to pay for using their power, hence the name. These vary wildly and someone’s price can be smoking a cigarette while another one has to painstakingly arrange rocks in a certain pattern.

You’d expect them to play with this element in some way, basing the contracts off the characters somehow to add development or some sort of psychological hang-up, but this happens only once or twice and most prices are completely arbitrary. Not to mention, they’re also useless. It’s said at one point in the series that it’s (merely) rumored that a contractor who doesn’t pay their price will die a gruesome death, but you will literally never see this happen nor is it ever a threat.

Despite this purported restriction on contractors that might make the characters and the use of their powers more interesting, there are never any rules given on when a contractor needs to make their payment, and you get several scenes throughout the series of contractors just firing off their powers constantly without needing to stop or never having to consider that they’d need to pay their price. Imagine if, in the middle of battle, someone had to avoid using their power but couldn’t because they were in a position where they couldn’t fulfill their contract if they did so.

It seems so obvious, but this caveat is written into the series for absolutely no reason. If you want superpowered mutants then just have them, don’t include a rule that’s not going to be upheld for any sort of world consistency just so you can have the occasionally stupid scene of a woman eating a bunch of cigarettes as her price.

Another thing about contractors is that they’re kept hidden from society and to those that know of them they’re seen as calculating, self-centered, and emotionless. This is such a bogus part of the story’s drama because in as early as the first episode the viewer can clearly see this isn’t true at all, and it all feels artificial when it’s obvious that contractors behave no differently than humans.

There are also “Dolls,” which aren’t contractors but completely emotionless (for reals this time I guess) humans who have the ability to survey the landscape in different ways, such as through water or glass. This is such a weirdly specific distinction that I don’t know why there needed to be another class of humans running around and it goes to show how bloated (and dare I say, pretentious) the setting is for no reason.

There’s so much extraneous detail and organizations that the show comes across as complex, and perhaps it is, but that has nothing to do with the intelligence of its building blocks or the cleverness of their chemistry. Who the fuck is the old lady star gazer, why is the whole bit with star monitoring and contractors each representing a star a thing, and why is Kirihara so stupid that she doesn’t realize Hei is in every area where his star activates when he’s undercover.

Yoko Kanno does the music here but it’s easily the worst soundtrack I’ve heard from her. It’s nothing special, and I never would’ve looked up the composer—I coincidentally found out. This show is really lame. I wish it lived up to even a fraction of its potential but it doesn’t. The stand-alone stories are long, dull, and bland. The main characters are a base level of likable somehow, but aren’t given enough development, or have all of their development backloaded in the finale of the series for weak payoff, and the writing is frequently hammy (“Grrr, hey, stop right there!”) with a poorly placed sense of humor.

The superpowers are either highly specific, like JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, but barely used to make any creative scenes, or so generic in concept and the wasted idea of “prices,” that they’re really no better in execution than a standard shonen series. I’d call this one of the most overrated anime I’ve seen, but it didn’t have times where it made me want to kill myself, so that’s a plus. I just felt very bored and disappointed.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Feb 17, 2021

AnimeEnjoyer420

Not Recommended

Summary: Darker Than Black is a neo-noir crime thriller that has some nice pieces, but is held back by an incoherent story and a lack of progression in either the characters or the plot. It's structured as a series of 2 or 3 episode arcs, and many of the arcs are filler and don't link back to a single unified story, leaving the season as a series of floating, unconnected pieces that are fairly unsatisfying in the absence of a central story.

Positives:

+ Many of the arcs are strong individually. They're relatively compelling, if simple, crime thriller plots, and the action is good. ... Each arc will individually hold your interest for the most part.

+ Action scenes and animation look pretty good for the show being almost 15 years old.

Negatives:

- Unfocused plot. There's no real central story here, unless you count the final arc, which you can't really, since it only lasts about 4 episodes and is only vaguely alluded to before that. The show is basically a series of short stories that don't really connect to each other. A lot of things happen in these shorter stories, but it isn't really anything of significance. There are two separate arcs following the internal power struggles in minor gangs that are never once referenced outside of that particular arc. This kind of episodic storytelling can work in a show with stronger themes or by framing it around a strong main character, but Darker Than Black has neither of those, so it ends up largely being a collection of entertaining stories that don't mean anything or have a larger narrative when they're put together.

- Difficult to care about the characters. Especially early on, the main characters in the series are almost an afterthought. Even Hei, the nominal main character of the series, is sidelined for long stretches, only showing up to foil a bad guy at a critical moment after being largely uninvolved in the rest of the story. They almost seem tangential to the oneshot characters that are only in for their particular arc. A lot of energy and attention is put into making these temporary characters worthwhile, but it comes at the expense of the actual characters that will be with us for the whole series. Other characters, such as the private detective and his slacker assistant, could have been done away with entirely with virtually no impact on the show. They are also far too cagey about the main character, his past and his personality in particular. It's clear the intention was to make him a dark and mysterious Batman type figure, but it comes off as simply boring and unrelatable instead.

- Predictable storytelling. For a mystery/noir thriller, the mysteries in this series are not very entertaining. The plot twists will all be easily spotted from a mile away. It also has a bad case of Cowboy Bebop Syndrome, where it unceremoniously kills off its new character of the week at the end of their arc so the status quo is always preserved (Huang's lover is the most obvious example of this). After you start noticing this happen regularly, it becomes impossible to care about side characters that are virtually guaranteed to be in the ground by the end of the next episode at the absolute latest.

- Weak ending. Slight spoilers ahead, but I'll keep it vague. The ending is a real disappointment, teasing an impossible choice for the protagonist only to have him choose option 3, which is for everything to stay exactly the same and for him to not have to make the choice at all. In the end, we end up basically in the same place we started, only with a lot more people dead. It's an extension of the show's broader problem with a lot of things happening, but none of it ever really meaning much.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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