Jul 15, 2016
While Death Billiards worked as a charming proof of concept and short film, attempting to expand a small concept into a full series can present some challenges...
The first and foremost problem I had with this series was removing the singular nature of Quindecim and basically turning it into a bureaucracy. Quindecim has pretty easy rules to follow while the players engage in the game, but the nature of the world soon becomes muddled by the arbitrary extra rules applied to both the arbiters and the world itself alike. These rules become so muddled and arbitrary that by the end they're basically thrown out the window
...
in order for a contrived, cliche ending.
The added characters also add to the muddling, most are flat and one dimensional with some designs that are so heinous I thought they were Black Butler background characters. It's a shame considering how appealing the art style is and how nice the designs of the original two characters are.
The best parts of the episodes are, of course, the games themselves and learning about the characters pasts and personalities as they play them. The anime could have just been 12 episodes of that alone and I would have been satisfied, but it seems as though the writers didn't have enough ideas to keep the series going on that alone.
Decim and the girl's arcs are lame and cliche, the upper management of Quindecim are bland and hardly make sense in the scheme of things (the lotus haired guy? what's his deal? what's the point? why did the series NEED a "villain"?), the worldbuilding is shallow, and the "dummy" imagery is reminiscent of a bygone time of edgy early 2000s anime.
On a positive note, the art style itself is still nice just like the short, and Decim and the girl's original personalities from the short shine through during some occasions, and some of the sound/music choices are interesting, but none of the positives are really enough to justify sitting through all 12 episodes of it.
In short, if you liked Death Billiards then just...watch that again.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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