Feb 14, 2015
To begin, I would like to point out how amazing the art and animation is in K. It is very pleasant to look at, and (most of the time) the animation is seamless. Also, the soundtrack is above average, and I really enjoyed the opening and ending themes especially. Now, let's get into the problems I had with the show.
K spent a ton of time on world building, only to end up not actually using most of the stuff they spent time explaining. In the early episodes they talk about how there are 7 kings, and the colorless king, but only the red, blue, gold,
...
and silver king actually appear in the anime; on top of that only the red and blue clansmen appear in the anime. So why have 7 kings?
Also they explain that Neko is a strain that has special powers, which I thought was a really cool concept. But she was the only one (or the only one to appear in the anime at least) so what was the point? It seems like her only real purpose was to make Shiro and Kuro really OP for no reason. It would have been interesting to see if there was another strain like her on an opposing side with a different ability, and make the battles more interesting or something. I don't know, just my thoughts on her.
K is also guilty of using what we call big "no-nos" in story telling. The one that K is most famous for abusing is giving tons of exposition to the audience, using characters that would have no reason to be discussing the information; it is just a really lazy way to convey information to the audience. They do this MANY times; one such example of this is in one of the very last episodes when the blue king and the red king are talking about the "swords" of each king (the big ass ones that float in the sky) and how it shows their true form or how they are on the inside; basically when a king is weak their sword looks all weak and broken and vice versa. They spend roughly 4 minutes talking about this when obviously (being kings) they would already know this information, so why are they talking about it? Why are they wasting so much screen time discussing things that they clearly already know? It would have been much better to explain stuff like this to Shiro because he didn't really know anything that was going on, so there would be a reason to explain it to him.
Also, one thing that I really didn't get was their weapons. Why are they using swords if this takes place in the future? And the fact that the red clansmen use baseball bats and lead pipes and such implies that the weapon doesn't really affect their strength, but they use they powers to augment their weapon to make it strong. So why use weapons at all if they are just using their powers to augment them anyway? Why not just use their powers alone to fight (and actually, the red king does only use his powers to fight, and is the only character to do so).
The characters were very bland and generic for the most part; none of them really stood out as a unique character particularly. I didn't find any characters super unlikable or just plain bad per se, but there are no characters in K that really stand out as something I have never seen before. Part of this may be attributed to K trying to use so many characters to accomplish so little. They didn't need as many characters as they had to tell the story they wanted to tell, and if they had opted for using less characters, they may have had enough time to really develop them and fully flesh them out.
Final Scores:
Story: 3
Art: 8
Sound: 7
Character: 3
Enjoyment: 5
Overall: 5
Overall I didn't hate K, nor did I think it was a "bad" anime. I just thought it was one of those anime like Guilty Crown where all of their budget went into the art/animation/sound and not into the characters/story. I thought it was pretty average, probably wouldn't recommend to a friend, as there are many anime that do much more in the same amount of episodes (or less).
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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