My snarking in the parenthesis of the previous paragraph should clue you in what makes this take on Shakespeare's classic a major issue for me. It relies so heavily on cliches for its plot and character developments, that it's laughable. Romeo's the idealistic and courageous young boy, Lord Montague the merciless and power-hungry ruler, Tybalt the revenge-seeking loner, Mercutio the opportunistic power-snagger, and so forth. Basically, mostly everyone in the series is tacked on with an archetype and they don't really develop very much out of it. In addition, the characters tend to make very illogical decisions in many instances that the series tries playing up as dramatic yet come across more ridiculous, especially in the finale of the series. Only character I really found myself caring for was "Willy", whose foppish and flamboyant take on William Shakespeare provided some humor and sanity for me in this mess of a series.
Visuals were decent for the most part with vivid color and a good amount of visual detail applied for scenery and character designs. Action scenes were somewhat engaging with the implementation of Dragon Steeds used for travel and engaging into battles, though animation wasn't a major element in their use since many such scenes were flourishes and weren't relying on regular animation shortcuts. The dramatic musical score for the series is nice to listen to featuring orchestral pieces and a nice ballad from Korean singer Lena Park for an OP and insert song, though are quite overwhelming in their implementation at points during key scenes in the series.
Overall, I found Romeo x Juliet to be quite underwhelming. The anime tries being dramatic in its take on Shakespeare's tragic work, but takes too many liberties with its source material and dabbles into too many cliches to be a unique work compared to Gonzo's earlier effort with Gankutsuou. Definitely don't waste any time with this one.
