Lord of Vermilion: Guren no Ou

This is a review of the anime only. I have not read the manga.

I marathoned this in almost one sitting. It had a lot of potential that it never lived up to, and in the end, was extremely disappointing. As other reviewers have mentioned, this should have been done in more than twelve episodes. I have not read the manga so this review is of the anime only having no other information than what was presented in the anime.

What I liked about it:

1. It had an all-star cast of seiyuus.
2. The character art was well done.
3. The story had a ... ton of potential.
4. There was a lot of action.

What I disliked about it:

1. It moved too quickly from the mid-point on. It was clear that a lot of important information was being left out for the sake of saving time.
2. There were too many cast members to go into depth with any of them in such a short amount of time. I didn’t get attached to anyone and it’s rare for me to not get attached to at least one character.
3. The ending didn’t resolve anything. All the questions were left unanswered and there’s no promise of a sequel. It made it feel like a giant waste of time.

STORY: The story had great potential but was never fully developed. Motives were never explained. People became attached to one another with no explanation as to why. Characters made choices that were never fully explained. Every episode brought new questions but never answered any and the ending didn’t either. (It could be argued that some of the questions were answered but since those “answers” were just insuations and speculation, I don’t feel that they were answered. I want evidence.)

CHARACTERS: The characters could have been amazing, but they weren’t. There were too many in too short of a time span with nowhere near enough development for me to grow to care about any of them. The most interesting character to me was the tattooed hoodie guy and I never found out a thing about him! That drove me crazy and not in a good way.

ART: I liked the character designs. They were nothing special but they were pretty. Some of the blood armor, or whatever it was supposed to be, looked pretty awesome, Kark’s in particular, but most were just abstract and odd. I felt that could have been done better. Some of the monsters had really great detail but some were just awful. The female detective's gun holster looking like a bra was so stupid it was distracting.

MUSIC: I didn’t like either the OP or ED and skipped through them every time. The music during the anime itself didn’t strike me either good or bad. I don’t remember it all.

Overall, I don’t recommend this anime. It’s really great for the first several episodes but then it gets confusing and the ending not answering any questions at all just made it feel like a waste of time. I'm honestly surprised at how poor this was given the caliber of the seiyuus and the high-end production companies. I'm not sure what went wrong but it sure went wrong.

Story: 4/10
The story started out very promising. You start off with an action packed fight scene, showing a previous "play," where you then go to the current play. You start to look out for the important characters, but from there it really just goes down hill. The story felt like it was all over the place, where you would end one episode and suddenly you were at a totally different scene.

*Spoiler*
One of the episodes ended with a fight scene at the school, and then the next episode it started up with the team, with members you "technically" didn't know were part of the ... church, destroying these historical sites.
*End Spoiler*

Scenes like this really created a disjointed scene making it overly confusing as to what had happened in between scene jumps. The story itself also seemed lacking in substance. It kept talking about how the past was the end all be all. Your fate can't be changed, but we never understood what the previous fate really was. We saw one whole scene, and all other previous fates weren't even mentioned until the last 2 episodes.

The only interesting thing about this anime was the morally ambiguous sides. This anime, unlike others, didn't present a good or bad side. They presented teams that had their own reasoning behind their actions. This allowed you to choose a side where as most anime predetermine your "favorite" team.

Art: 5/10
There is nothing really spectacular or notable about the artwork. Very average, but not terrible.

Sound: 5/10
Similarly to art, there was nothing truly awesome or notable about the sound. I did find that in the dub, the characters voices didn't really suit some of their characters. I felt like there could have been better choices.

Character: 4/10
There is very little character development. Chihiro got the most development and even that, for almost 10 episodes straight, they hinted at the same thing over and over. If they hadn't kicked the poor dead horse so many times, it would have been an earned reveal. It even lead Kakihara, to being a babbling nuisance. He kept harping on Chihiro, blaming him for everything and it was to the point that this interesting character, became annoying and you kind of wanted him to die. As for the others, they got little or no growth. We don't get to explore their powers, we only explored Chihiro. Most of the characters just appeared with no explanation as to who they were or what they could do. We just knew that they were 10xs weaker than Chihiro and would probably just be killed out.

Enjoyment: 4/10
I did enjoy exploring this anime. I kept looking forward to new episodes to see if there was anything really redeeming about it, but there wasn't. I honestly thought this anime would turn out to just reset time and un-screw everything up. I did truly enjoy figuring out who to side for since both sides had their faults, but other than that, nothing really stood out.

Overall: 5/10
It was just a poor anime. The story could have had so much potential, but assuming do to little budget, there anime's run was short. It felt like to fit the entire plot in 12 measly episodes, they had to rush the plot along. Leaving a lot of things disjointed and not enough to time to explain anything or even provide character development. There was just so much to digest in this anime, that this series is not suited for a 12 episode season.

Recommendation: I still recommend watching this anime, see what you think. It was still a fun few hours of my life, but I definitely would not go back and re-watch this.