Yuukoku no Moriarty

Since most anime sways away from modern politics its often easy to forget that Japan is home to the largest non-ruling communist party in the world. Then a show like this comes out and you get to experience the fun of a completely partisan and highly politically charged anime. What fun. It's not like anime not being full of politics is why I watch it in the first place.

As a modern anime with professional production values it looks and sounds good. The voice acting is excellent and the colours are used effectively to create a great looking anime.

The real problem for me is how the ... anime is so unbelievably biased in how it looks at Britain's societal structure in the late 1800s. It's such a partisan view that, as someone who has studied that period extensively, it's almost impossible to ignore. For one it acts like Britain's class system was highly stratified so that only the nobility could ever really get ahead, this is false. Modern Britain is arguably more stratified than Britain in the 1860s and escaping poverty is significantly harder now than it was then for a large number of reasons that principally come down to the demand for industrial labour. The show also focuses on classism but ignores the fact that in Britain the upper class and the lower class have generally always had good relations with one another. The people in Britain who had extremely poor relations with the upper and lower class in Britain were the middle class. The idea of the sneering upper class spitting down upon the starving lower class simply wasn't a thing in Britain in the 1860s and it's a key part of why those aristocrats delivered massive majorities to the Liberal Party throughout the 1860s.

If you can stomach the bad history you might like it though.

I have never posted an anime review until now. But for this one, I feel obligated.

The Seiyuu are awesome, graphically it's beautiful. But that's all. The manga is slaughtered. The scenes are modified, clearly diminished, and above all we focus on unnecessary scenes instead of doing as in the manga: interested in people who come to ask the Moriartys for help.

The first few episodes made me wince, but I had some hope. But the 4th episode made it clear to me that this anime does not seek to convey a message with it. They just want to surf the "gore" and the "we follow a ... bad guy" side without giving any real motivation, without giving depth to investigations and missions.


I advise against the anime, and I advise people to go watch the manga.

(sorry for my spelling mistakes, I am French at the base)

4/10 Very shallow show. Fanfiction? More like a bleak shadow of the original...


Imagine Sherlock Holmes's original series but adapted for kids. This show is exactly this, a really dumbed down version so that even 5yo can get the point.

Story: 3/10
What you see on the screen is exactly what will happen, there is no mystery or any sort of guesswork that you need to do. Too predictable, mysteries are solved effortlessly, the main characters are too powerful for the challenges they face. I got a feeling that the original creator of the manga misinterpreted the original work (hope they actually read it) and no one ... fixed the deficiencies during the production...

Art: 8/10
The art and animation are of good quality. Lots of detailed backgrounds, textures, character design is fine too. You can tell the show was funded well, but that's the sad part. There are great story-driven shows out there that could not afford such excellent visuals, but somehow this garbage got them.

Sound: 8/10
Music in the opening/ending is ok. Throughout the show, the sound engineer(s) appropriately used environmental sounds to enhance the action.

Character: 2/10
Very flat, non developing characters, main traits taken from original Conan Doyle story, but mangafied a bit. Moriarty is a cheap version of Kira from Death Note. Sherlock, well, nothing outstanding.

Enjoyment: 4/10

Overall: 4/10
Please don't get your hopes up, I don't know why this shown has almost 8 score right now. Perhaps, most people rated when the first episode came out. If you haven't read the original Sherlock Holmes, I highly recommend it, unlike this show.

I went into this anime with high expectations, seeing as everyone was calling it the anime of 2020. I wanted to give this anime a 7 initially, but by the time I finished it, I felt like giving it a 5 would be too generous. So I settled for a 3.

It’s like buying a jelly/cream filled donut and finding air in the middle instead. You can’t even feel ripped off because the outside is so greasy, it’d probably give you a stomachache anyways.

The art was beautiful. I enjoyed the scenes aesthetically, and while there were moments where Moriarty looked like a big brain misshapen alien, ... it was still a beautifully drawn anime. Vaguely had Black Butler vibes to it.

Moriarty as a character was cold and flat. Nothing remarkable about him. The way he and his merry band of homicidal fanatics behaved, it looked like they were copy/pasted into scenes to save time and you couldn’t even tell the difference. Moriarty was meant to be a charismatic villain, I think? But he wasn’t even that. Heck, he wasn’t even really cold. Just completely flat and devoid of emotion. Like a puppet speaking lines. When they introduced Sherlock, it wasn’t even a big deal. What’s sad is that for how little Sherlock was in it, he looked more like a villainous playboy/deadbeat than a misanthropic genius. It wasn’t so much ‘Moriarty the Patriot’, but ‘Moriarty and Sherlock: Trying to find a personality’.

The one positive of this whole fiasco was the background music and sound effects. There is one scene in one of the episodes that was a glorious 10 or second ASMR clip.

Plot? What plot? Moriarty’s whole shtick was ‘Death to the Bad Nobles’, but he, Louis and Albert were bad nobles too? But I guess it’s okay since they’re the ‘right kind’ of bad noble. Honestly, it wasn’t about three nobles sticking it to society, it was about Moriarty forcing people to murder on his behalf with his fanatical followers. Sherlock was just along for the ride of be the paper foil to the second half of the plot and give some appearance of a ‘personality’ and failing.

Overall, I found this series to be a waste of time. Its only redeeming quality was the art and music. Moriarty the Patriot? More like Moriarty the Hypocrite and his murderous sycophants.

P.S. Shout out to that final scene, you the real Black Butler ripoff MVP.

If you're a fan of second degree watching and having a good laugh at a show, Yuukoku no Moriarty is this season's gem. After passing the first episodes, that are fairly good, the viewer will slowly descend into the dephts of stupidity.

As the antagonists become more and more of a caricature ( hilariously so), the protagonists' plots to take them down become dumber and dumber, and the whole world goes down following the series' fall from a period piece to a very badly written but outstandingly funny battle of bishonens, flexing their intelligence with close ups and mysterious looks, while delivering absolutely idiotic lines with ... the most serious tone.

The show's pretense to be intelligent and edgy is, in a sense, quite adorable, and gives you the same feeling as a preschooler trying to teach you about social inequalities. The series may still recover from this fall, but I personnaly doubt it, and will continue watching it ironically.

I tried really hard to get into this show because it looked really cool, and I haven't seen anything Bishounen in a long, long time. I thought this would be a great way to get back into that scene, but honestly this show is just...it's a boring show. I can't really say it's a *bad* show, because I definitely didn't hate the 5 episodes I dredged through, but it's definitely not good. And that's a shame because it has the potential to really be a decent watch.

Lets start off with the story, the set up is pretty good. We are introduced to our main ... protagonist in the first episode, told his motivation in the second, and explored his backstory in the third. The pacing isn't terrible, and neither is the general premise. The real issue lies in the characters.

The characters are really flat, they're there but I've seen like a thousand other characters in other anime who have filled their predictable roles far better. Our protagonist, James Moriarty is every bit the suave, cool, calm, and collected genius you'd expect to see in a Sherlock Holmes anime. He's a pretty boy with a lot of money who has a penchant for getting back at the rich assholes of victorian society. That being said, he's incredibly boring as there's nothing really interesting about him as a person outside of his "We should just kill all the rich people' mentality.

his brothers are the same way, seeming more like backdrops to prop up his character than actual characters themselves. It's quite telling how boring they are given the only things we really learn about them as people, is how they managed to agree with Moriarity on his whole 'eat the rich' idealogy. I never made it to see Sherlock, so i don't know if he's a good character or not. I'm gonna go ahead and say he was probably not all that interesting judging by the countless other characters we met along the way.

The Art for this show is mediocre, it's nothing to right home about. The character designs, while good, are also kind of generic. There's a scene in the 5th episode in fact where Moriarty and his brothers are all just...wearing the exact same suit and there's no variation in style or color.

The sound design and the soundtrack are horribly misplaced, by which I mean they sound as if they've been composed for an entirely different anime. especially the ending song. It's a preppy edm jpop song that doesn't really mesh well with the dark tone of the show. Episode 2 showcases this well when it plays immediately after an incredibly tense scene. It was enough to break my suspense of the episode entirely when I first heard it. The sound design in the anime is also pretty generic to the point where I think they just ripped assets from some app and placed them in the appropriate spots.

There's nothing clever about it, nothing that makes it stand out like in other anime. It's standard, boring sound design of scenery.

My general enjoyment of the show was pretty low, especially since each episode is pretty much the same episode. This isn't necessarily a problem, but it became incredibly problematic for me because the characters are so fucking boring to watch. Each episode all the way up until the 8th is just this basic template:

Flashback to something terrible happening to some poor people

Moriarty goes to the place the bad thing happened, and learns about it through gossip or someone wanting to consult with him.

Moriarity meets with the rich asshole who did the bad thing to the poor people at the beginning of the episode

Moriarty kills the rich dude in some elaborate ass way that involves the poor people the rich dude hurt

happy scene with the poor people thanking him and his brothers, boom, end of episode, roll credits.

And it doesn't get better after that, it stays the same boring show all the way up until that point. I couldn't make it to episode 8 where Sherlock is supposedly introduced, but frankly I don't think I missed out on anything important. Give this a try if you like mediorcre boring pretty boy anime with awful 'Gotcha" moments by the oh so smart protagonist, and his lack luster brothers.

The only saving grace is that the guys were hot, but there are hotter men in anime, so even thats not really a reason to jump into this.

Time and time again Sherlock Holmes has been re-imagined, re-invented, modernised and so on. But often times, when set in the particular historical period the original novel is set, people forget the effects of the time period small intricacies.
(as well as read and pay attention to the source material, but then again Sherlock name sells, seen by how much people venerate this anime lol)

Moriarty is a incredibly interesting character in the novels, however he was not given a lot of focus.

Here the anime had a chance to explore his character and...well choose to play the "Noble bad, poor good" card as his motivation. ... Which frankly for a character such as Moriarty is lacking(as in not strong enough for him to trouble himself).
He's a genius like Sherlock, so he must have an even stronger motivation to push him to be the 'Napoleon of Crime'. Even if he did want to change the situation of the lower classes, crime is the least favourable thing, as often it hurts more those of which that do not have the means to defend themselves.

The characters look great in the show, I do like their design but they lack strong motivators to follow Moriarty so blindly.
The villains are often so dumb and easy to control that Moriarty is just a genius because he is surrounded by idiots.

They butchered Sherlock's character too, I won't get into detail but it's worth seeing (he looks good but meh much too easily played by Moriarty).

Fandom for this is often only simping for the looks of the show rather than the content, people aren't thinking too much about how some of the 'logic' is often very questionable.

P.S. On Ep 8 - Police constables hats have Queen Elizabeth II's initials not Victoria's (and that's priceless aha)

I've watched and found it a very ok show, definitely not the best of the best but good when there wasn't anything else too thrilling to watch.

“I am profoundly disappointed in you” - H. Watson

* CONTAIN SPOILERS * (How you analyze something without giving some spoilers?)


Hello anime fans of all around the globe, what a terrible year this was, I’m just impressed of how everything just went worst and worst and worst. But this is not the time to shit on how this year was a disappointment, is time to say how Yuukoku no Moriarty was a disappointment.

First things first, this is NOT the first time someone’s re-imagined Moriarty as a hero (or more commonly, an antihero). Michael Kurland’s Professor Moriarty series of books comes to mind in the prose arena. ... For those who like a historical background, anime takes place in the late 19th century during the Victorian era, a time when parliamentarism provided an approximation between the social strata. Even so, the concentration of goods in the hands of a few, resulting in the oppression of workers. In this way, the anime deals with the huge economic and social inequality of English society, and that is where our protagonist, KIRA, I mean, Moriarty, comes in. Responsible for combating the injustices suffered by the "poor" while passing for the second son of an aristocratic family.

The first thing that strikes me is the anime's Moriarty compared to Doyle's Sherlock. The big difference between the two is due to the way they want to achieve their goals, Moriarty as said several times in the anime, will use whatever means are necessary (less to kill others himself, because he is a gentleman) while Sherlock despite having the same ideals, seeks justice "fairly". This difference could have been much more explored and valued especially after episode 9.

This is the second review I make for this anime, the first one, I had only watched the first 5 episodes, and until episode 8, it’s go the same way, Moriarty is fucking GOD and do the most brilliant crimes (without get his hands dirty), no one can resolve it and That’s it, The End, that’s Moriarty. For me that’s the first big problem with this, Sherlock just took to much time to make an appearance, and the cases that we should involve the telespectador, started to get boring, the same and the same thing over and over again, yes they change somethings but that’s it.

Episode 8 starts, everything changed, Sherlock gave this show everything, yes his is intelligent as Moriarty, but he’s a far better character than everyone in the show. Moriarty plays like the intelligent, cold blood and manipulator character (think everyone is just tired of this type of “person”), In contrast, Sherlock is extrovert and comic, in other words, his a human. Unfortunately, Sherlock was not enough to save this broken ship, a perfect example is the last case, how Moriarty “find the culprit” is fucking stupid.

I will continuing to follow the series with the second season and maybe give the manga a chance, but this first season is like Watson said “I am profoundly disappointed in you”, if you really want to get into Sherlock universe just read Doyle books, you will be impressed by the differences. This is quote, Another bad adaptation featuring the Sherlock universe, unquote.

The main character is stupid. Or rather there are too many psychological inconsistencies.
Which is a shame considering the amazing art style, music and premise.
Moreover, every episode leaves you with a bad aftertaste. It is the first anime in my whole life that I felt utterly disgusted by at some point which is saying a lot.

It is very difficult to explain the stupidity of All the characters and storyline without spoiling the story so consider the following scenario:

If the person closest to you dies and you get your revenge by brutally killing the murderer, would you continue living with a smile on your face as ... though this person never died?

Those kind of psychological inconsistencies drove me mad not just once or twice, but EVERY. Single. Episode. That is not even including the main characters, but the most irrelevant side characters, as I do not want to give away how completely illogical the main characters are portrayed.

To be completely honest the anime intrigued me. But that is not enough if you are looking for an anime with brain games, mysteries and actual comprehensible characters. This is my first rant about an anime ever, but perhaps I just went in expecting something that would live up to its reputation and would intrigue me psychologically.

Now i will solve a crime, a crime named Yuukoku no Moriarty. Given the theme, its obvious that the author is a Sherlock Holmes fan itself, choosing the battle between Moriarty and Holmes, that Conan Doyle never wrote, because it was a pretext to stop writing about the great detective, but the idea was charming to the fans, and till now, because it is always appears in any modern atempt to write about Sherlock Holmes.

Second, i presume that the author is not a good writers itself, choosing to take Moriarty point of view, in the thrive of originality. It wouldnt be a poor choice ... itself, but to make use sympathize with the villan, unable to give him a compelling personality, he tries to give Moriarty some complexity, by turning him in a anti-hero, a vigilante, a revolutionary. Thats why he fraud the sociology of Britain, inventing a class struggle that didnt exist, using an outdated economic history of England. The life post industrial revolution was better than before, although we still learn the oposite in school. 100 year of obsolete historiography. In a historic novel, this is fatal.

Of course, i didnt expect this show to be Manzoni's "Promessi sposi", it was still possible to create a enjoyable story with this rotten basis, but to make the crimes of Moriarty less terrible and, to some extent, justified, he turns nobles in cynical psychos, ruining all the possibilities of moral dilemas and simplifying all. The author have fear that we stop reading or watching because Moriarty is rotten, but, make the society worse, we wouldnt have this problem. In Death Note, Raito is capable of murdering inocent people for his ideology. Moriarty no. Who draws more your attention?

The show gets better when Sherlock appears and the mastermind battle begins, make the show slightly better. But tha last episode, making Sherlock incapable of seeing what he would is kind of desapointing. The diference between the twos would only rest in the means, and the last two episodes was to give us that impression. Despite the distortions of Sherlock's personality, he still has moral dilemas, he is a better character than Moriarty and is him that mantains this shipreck alive. The two episodes retelling "A Study in scarlet" were the best part of the show.

Plus, the BL character design and ludicrous and exagerated reactions dont make the experience any better.

This show could be great. Just watch Frtiz Lang's "Mabuse the gambler" and "The testament of Doctor Mabuse" to know how this show could have been if the theme, Moriarty vs Holmes, was done right. This show is just a bad maniqueist fanfic. The only mistery that i couldnt solve is how so much people enjoyed it to the point of getting an 7.9 in MAL.

To be honest, I wasn’t planning to watch this series for I am kinda biased against it. Anime based on western products? The ones I watched were bad. London as a setting? The one I watched was bad. Also, based on Holmes’ stories? The previous anime version was a family oriented episodic comedy with talking animals. Also, I’m not very familiar with the books nor other adaptations, I watched the movies starring Robert Downey Jr. and I didn’t like them. Also the poster has this combination of brown and red that instantly made me think that it was going to be edgy garbage.

Yet wherever I ... go this series has a rather good if not high rating, and it’s also very different from the works I talked about so far. The shows based on western properties I watched weren’t based on classic literature and the World Masterpieces Theater is highly regarded so why not giving this one a chance? The series set on London that I watched was a reverse harem with an amnesiac protagonist and silly supernatural elements thrown in just because while this one is a crime mystery with sociopolitical overtones. I didn’t watch Sherlock Hound but this one has humans and it is not focused and the action as the movies from the last decade.

So I watched the first two episodes and my suspicions were confirmed. To begin with something positive, the artwork is pretty well done and it practically has no quality drops, is very consistent in this regard. The backgrounds are beautiful to look at and resemble the time and place it takes place in pretty well.

The rest, however, is not as polished, the character designs are very generic and everyone is a bishounen which gave me serious fujoshi bait vibes. And boy does the series attempt to make everyone look young and attractive, just look at Holmes’ companions for Pete’s sake. Motions are serviceable for this type of story, nothing really wrong nor bad there. The effects are not bad but when a crime happens, the series uses a filter with this same combination of brown and red ever present in edgy anime nowadays when it tries to be thriller or horror and it fails miserably at it because there’s nothing scary nor much tension in it.

I don’t have much to say about the sound department, the music and sound effects do their work just fine and fit the setting, the voice acting is ok but nothing special.

Now, despite being promoted as a crime mystery, the series is not that, for there is no culprit to find and murder to resolve, you are explicitly shown who the responsibles are and how they kill their victims. It’s closer to a psychological thriller, where we see Moriarty taking advantage of people’s hatred towards evil nobles that constantly mess with their lives if they didn’t ruin them yet, and leads them to killing those bastards, that’s it. Moriarty is basically like Johan from Monster but since I didn’t watch that show, what reminded me of was the antagonist from Babylon and that made me want to drop the show before I even began the second episode.

Also, for a series attempting to tap into discrimination based on social status, the handling of such topic is completely ridiculous. Every noble we see on screen is the worst scum of the Earth, we’re talking about Akame ga Kill! level of characterization here, if one whole side out of two in a conflict is presented as complete garbage then the theme exploration is reduced to a simple good vs. bad type of story with clear sides because one of them is completely demonized while the other is always victimized, which is the most simplistic and silliest way of dealing with sociopolitical topics.

The only exception as of now is the oldest brother and only because he killed his whole family. It’s very hard to accept this killing for a greater good excuse of the protagonists when they sadistically plan ahead how to drive both the nobles and their killers mad and anticípate the deaths of the formers.

And don’t get me started on their backgrounds, completely ridiculous, victimizing and preachy. Aside from that, Moriarty is a Gary Stu, for he’s good at eveything, outsmarts everyone and plays with them however he wants, does absolutely everything he wants, and the police somehow don’t notice how many nobles are being killed or disappear so close to each other, nor do they search for clues and weapons used in the murders. If the protagonist has no competition whatsoever then there’s no tension at all.

I dropped the show on its second episode but picked it up again later on and I can summarize the first half of the series like this, simple exploration of a serious topic with a huge scale, horrible characterization, and tensionless episodic cases. Holmes appears in the sixth episode to make things a little more interesting, but the case on the cruise was easily the worst and most ridiculous of the bunch and even he couldn’t save it. The culprit wasn’t even doing anything until Moriarty started to drive him mad, like Freddy Quimby in The Simpsons, he was a horrible but innocent person, until he snaps and kills in an over the top way and gets exposed and killed rather stupidily.

Thankfully, the last 4 episodes are way better not only because they adapt A Study in Scarlet and some other case but also because they focus on the cat and mouse game Moriarty and Holmes play with each other, it is not Light and L but still alright to the most part, and they focus on how Holmes is slowly getting corrupted by Moriarty’s schemes while showing how ruthless the latter can be, if I can give credit to the show for something, is being consistent with this character so far, showing his manipulations and preparations in detail and how he never doubts when playing with the lives of people at his will, he’s basically a blonde Shogo Makishima. Also, finally some detective work.

Honestly, this dynamic between Holmes and Moriarty and the similarities to Death Note is what made me want to watch the second season when it comes out the next year, if the whole series was like that, I would have given it a higher rating, but when you spend 7 out of 11 episodes reminding me of series such as Akame ga Kill! and Babylon, then you leave me no choice. Oh, and it was still better than Talentless Nana, because it has a far more consistent tone. But that is a story for another time.

Watch this anime if you like a villain MC who pretty much does as he wants and wins.

Story: A character who, can manipulate anybody, and can do anything because people, well are there to be manipulated. I don't dislike the manipulation and actions. What bothers me is that the main character does everything without any effort. people in this story are just too stupid. He is not that great, the rest are just that bad. 0 points.

Directing: While no story is being seen here whatsoever it's still enjoyable to watch which is the director's job. 2 points

Art: Does its job not extraordinary, not awful. 1 ... point

Characters: AI with no brain. too boring. 0 points

Personal preference: While this anime tries to be a dark one, it becomes just a bad one. I enjoy villains and dark themes though. 1 point

TLDR, While having no story, the anime is not boring at all it just gets repetitive to see the MC having no obstacle at all.

My score for this show is lower than perhaps it deserves objectively. That's because I am a massive fan of Sherlock Holmes. I've watched all the renditions of the book. Read the book in original 19th century English (and own the same book). I know every sentence from those stories, word for word, by heart.

At the start, I had high hopes. Japan did interesting takes on western stories before with creative liberties and unique approaches. But when I saw Ms. Hudson as a busty redhead being super happy go lucky and having hots for Holmes, my heart broke. I forced myself through couple of episodes ... but all I got was more and more anger.

It was as if someone took dearest toy of my childhood, shat them out and then glued a big nasty and overly used dildo to its forehead. Everything I loved so much about the series was raped. No other word describes it as aptly as that one.

Should you watch it. No if you love the original works. Otherwise, you might give it a shot. There are plenty of overrated anime out there, this one might deserve its score. Art and sound were good.

This show is so formulaic, it gets boring.

The incredible protagonist who does everything effortlessly and never loses, while every villain is a caricature. There's no depth at all in any of the characters, not even the protagonist. His motif, his reasoning, is way too simplistic and really breaks the illusion of a smart person, the resume of it being: "rich people bad, poor people good". And the villains are cartoony, as in, they'd let any poor person die and suffer in front of them just because they're poor, repeat ad nauseum for the entire show.

The plot is always the same; a poor person suffering in ... the hands of a nobleman, someone dying, and then cut to the present, where Moriarty arrives at the scene. Then he formulates a simplistic plan, the rich dies, and the poor person gets retribution. Sometimes the plan is daringly stupid, sometimes "ooga booga", in which case it is just Moriarty using his super powers of manipulation to drive a man to kill himself after talking for a minute.

I don't recommend this, there's nothing to take home from this anime.