I guess the first thing I should cover is what everybody can literally and clearly see, the art and animation. The art and animation of K are stunning. The characters and the city-scape is all look really good and the nuances they add are interesting such as the bending of space when Kuroh uses his “hand” ability (I see what you did there GoHands) to launch himself away from the Howling Flame, aka Homura, or the crazy effects of Neko's powers. However, despite how good it may look there are some minor flaws that I noticed. In the first episode- yes the first episode- there was one instance where the bartender character spoke English but his lips weren't synced properly. Seriously, GoHands? You messed up on lip syncing in the first episode. Is a couple fixed frames really too hard? I've watched five different releases of the first episode and they all have the same problem so I'm fairly confident that it's not just me. There are also other times where limbs were stretched and positioned in strange and almost inhuman angles while the battles are going on but those aren't as noticeable.
Next is what you can clearly hear, the music and voice acting. As I mentioned in the opening paragraph, K has a jazzy and modern-sounding soundtrack that is intertwined with some classical nuances. Most of the time it has a nice, relaxing feel with a heavy emphasis on piano but there are other times where it picks up slightly, especially in battles. Unfortunately, the music never reaches to the ranks of something epic-sounding, it may sound cool and fitting but it never really got me pumped up for a battle or particular scene. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that it's bad, I can respect the composer's decision to keep the tone so mellow all the time; it's just a stylistic choice, nothing more. Speaking of stylistic choices, the one thing that K does well with its music is with the absence of it; yes, silence. Well, some may be wondering why that's so important in music and the thing is: a lack of sound is sometimes much more profound in a piece of music than the intricacies in the music itself. Some moments are simply best to leave silent than to have music playing throughout the entire scene, leave the sound effects to do the “talking” for themselves. And finally, speaking of talking and as with most of the Japanese voice acting, the voice acting in K is top-notch with each seiyuu fitting the role they are put into well; nothing much to complain about here. I actually found the cleaning robots to be randomly entertaining with their deep voices and samurai-esque sayings.
I guess that's enough of talking about the good stuff for now, on to the bad stuff- namely the characters. Besides the fact that the characters are forgettable, generic, and just good at being present, it seems as if they pulled people from everywhere and just piled them into K. Kuroh and Shiro (I wonder why they're named that? *sarcasm*) look a lot like Nezumi and Shion from No. 6, Yata looks like a typical skater-punk or like Beat from The World Ends With You, Neko is the cat-girl (go figure), and Seri the typical buxom anime blonde, just to name a few. There are a lot of characters in K, for example: literally every single character in Scepter 4 , the blue group, has a name that they call out when they pull out their swords for battle (innuendo). The problem with having such a large cast is that not very many characters receive development and this is one of the points where K suffers the most. There are few relationships that you really get to understand, namely Yata and Fushimi, the Silver King and the Gold King, and Neko and Shiro. These make you go: “Oh, okay that's why they're like that. Now what about the other characters?” The problem is there is no real explanation for any other relationships other than Kuroh's relationship with his Master and Suoh Mikoto's relationship with some of his fellow Howling Flame members and they also skim his relationship with the leader of Scepter 4, Munakata Reishi. By far though, Neko is the most dynamic character, almost making up for all the other emotions all the other characters lack. The rest of the characters are flat (in a literal sense), essentially remaining the same for the entire series, Shiro included.
Onto the next thing, the story. With a series such as K, one would expect there to be significant storytelling unlike in a high school comedy series that just involves a bunch of high school students talking about nothing important and doing nothing important. This is another of the points where K fails utterly. There is an absolute lack of any substantial story. Yes, there is plot, however, there is no real story-telling. A plot is an event- a fact. A story is what interweaves these plot points together and gives them meaning so that they are interesting to the audience. “I went to the store” is an example of plot; [i]Beowulf[/i] is an example of a story. The premise was a classic whodunit murder case which, if handled the right way, could have made a decent story. Instead, they decided to gather the viewpoints from the three different sects- blue, red, and black/white- and put them together to attempt to make a coherent story but it all amounted to nothing. The only part where there is a flicker of story is at the end where they tried to connect the dots.
Furthermore, there are no real motivations shown, especially as to why the Reds and Blues are really fighting and why the main bad-guy, who has no name, only a title, did what he did other than making the audience assume that they did it because they felt like it. In that sense, K is the epitome of the opposite of dramatic irony, also known as the unreliable narrator (more specifically a mix of the Clown and the Lair archetypes) wherein the characters themselves often know much more about the universe and situation than the audience does. Any explanation that is directed at the audience is vague and the further questions that are brought up by the answer are ignored completely, forcing the audience to just sit there and accept what's going on without question. Oh, so there are things called Strains, what are they and how do they get their powers? There are giant, floating super-swords called the Swords of Damocles (I appreciate the nod to folklore there) and they grant powers to people. How do they float and give people powers? Where did the Swords of Damocles come from? What are the units that constitute a single increase to the Weismann level? Okay, maybe that last one was a bit much to ask for but nonetheless, none of the above questions were answered in the anime series.
When I ask why people think K is so great they can't come up with anything other than mentioning how beautiful the visuals and animation are or that they like certain characters. For example, I asked one of my friends who thoroughly enjoys K and thinks it's great to explain the story to me in a clean and concise sentence and he cannot give me an acceptable answer. When I tell him things like “Yeah, in K, this guy gets stabbed and now he can speak German” he gives me the strangest of looks. K seemed like it was trying to please everybody using beautiful visuals and animation, using well-known seiyuu, adding in a lot of bishounen males for fangirls to fantasize about, fawn over, and argue over their own “one true pair”, putting in two (count them, two) curvaceous women, one a cat-girl who's a barely-clad or naked at all times, with random fanservice for male fans, and adding mystery with intense action- sprinkling in some mediocre comedy while it was at it. In the end, it all became a jumbled mess. Much like a temptress, K lures you in with her beauty and soothing voice and rewards you with fleeting sensations of pleasure for seeking her attention but, in the end, she leaves you hollow and wondering if it was all worth it- wondering what really attracted you to her in the first place. Similarly, the more I watched K, the more I questioned why I was still watching it, other than to just get it out of the way. The more I watched K, the more I came to realize that it's just a bedazzled pile of crap that plays cool music; no matter how great it may look or how good it sounds, a pile of crap will always be a pile of crap. With a sequel already announced and in the making, I can only hope that the second season makes up for all the flaws that plagued the first.
6 out of 10
