It failed.
Ranpo Kitan is an anime to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the death of Edogawa Ranpo. He's pretty much of the godfather of mystery series. If he was alive, i'm not sure if he would be happy about this adaptation of his works with the modern twist of these days.
For the story, i'll not talk about it you can just read the synopsis. However, what i can say is that the mysteries around the cases aren't really good. They are cases that could have been interesting but it goes so fast and they don't even show you a clue, they just throw the answer like that.
''Hey, we never showed you that girl or these clue but it doesnt matter, that's what happened deal with it.''
Where's the fun in this ? Dammit Makoto Uezu and Seiji Kishi stop touching mysteries and stuff. Stay with comedies. Please.
The art is good. It's not ugly but it's not ''holy sh- it's beautiful'' too ! However, we can see that they try to be original with the presentation and some of them are really appreciated like the people who only were silhouettes representing people that Kobayashi doesn't care at all and only the people that he finds interesting is seen normally. Just background characters for him. Sometimes, they try too hard with the symbolisms that it just gets boring.
The sound is ok. The OP and ED were some of the best in this season. ( I listen to them a lot in my car, no joke.) The OST is also nice, but there one song in particular that plays almost every episodes. Is the song bad ? No. But it gets annoying, a little bit like the song ''Don't loose your way'' in kill la kill.
The characters are ... most of the time forgetable. With the exception of one : Kobayashi. A boy who got us all confused, thinking that it was a girl. Kobayashi is bizarre and wants some action in his life... thats pretty much it. The protagonist pretty much gets in trouble, help sometimes Akechi and gets our ding confused. The other characters aren't worth mentioning with Hashiba who might be gay for Kobayashi (we will never know), the detective super-duper intelligent and anti-social Akechi and Minami the medical examiner aka one of the worst character this season. Popping out randomly, trying to be funny. The Shadow-man was good tho. Weird and sometimes creepy but he was definitly the most interesting one.
Overall, i was hoping that it gets better. The first episode people were sceptical and i was thinking: ''Oh c'mon people it's just the first episode. Give it some times.'' The more it was going, the more i was thinking that ... yeah, that's not good at all.
4/10, don't waste your time with it.
Well, there's only 11 episodes so you can try if you want but don't get your hopes up.
