What does surprise my about the popularity of this anime is the willingness and the amount of people that throw themselves over it, and the readiness to call this the best anime ever made.
I'll agree that this is one of the better anime of recent years, and it's obvious that it's quite good, it even spawned a couple of similar anime (Code Geass comes to mind). However that's not to say that it's without faults, and the same goes for the manga, which has pretty much those same faults.
One of the problems with the story is that the writer wanted to make it complex, and I do like what he did with it. It included some nice ideas like "Doublethink" (Read 1984 by George Orwell for what that means, and I really recommend that book. It's even clear to me that Tsugumi Ohba took some inspiration from 1984 and Brave New World) and had some good amount of plots within plots. However the story severely suffers when the complexity increases, even to the point that it becomes confusing of what happened with the story because of the overcomplexity of the story telling and all the plots going on. That doesn't quite happen with Death Note but it gets close to that at times.
Another problem lies with the characters. Several of the main characters are given a beyond human intelligence, this causes several problems.
One is that most of them appear as smug, arrogant, self-centred twats, which makes it hard to identify with the characters and at times completely propels the viewer out of the story.
A second problem is that at times the characters seem to posses information and knowledge that they couldn't and shouldn't know or have obtained. A good couple of actions couldn't have been taken unless the character taking them knew what another character is doing at that time or will do sometime in the future. Of course you can predict that someone could take that action but that takes an extreme amount of knowledge about that character and the circumstances that take place at that time. It's practically impossible to do that unless you can see the future or have read the script. This again caused me to fail to identify with the main characters.
Alright, let's get down to my scores.
Story: 8
The story is well written and well presented, it has a lot of depth and many unique items that have rarely been explored in anime, like the moral problem of having a villain type character as the main character.
It however suffers from the afore mentioned problems of going the route of over-complexity and illogical actions of the characters that they couldn't have taken without knowledge of future events.
However, all in all the story is very good and the issues presented in it are quite gripping.
Art: 9
The artwork is of a very high standard, very fitting with the anime and the type of story. There is hardly anything that I can comment on it.
Sound: 8
Fitting with the moods, clear and good choice of voice-actors.
Characters: 5
As said earlier, the super-human intelligence of the main characters are a major drawback on the whole experience. Another point is that the supporting cast is almost completely 2 dimensional, they have hardly any character development and can at most times be interchangeable, they just needed a character to take a certain action at a certain time and at most times it doesn't really matter which character takes that action. This causes the supporting casts to completely lack any depth since they are mostly there as puppets used for story progression.
Misa is especially annoying and useless.
Enjoyment: 9
Even with all the above problems the anime is highly enjoyable and can easily draw in most viewers, even though it sometimes catapults them out of the story by inexplicable actions of the characters or downright stupidity.
Overall: 8
I'd have to say that even with the problems it's still is a very good anime, and among my favourites of recent years.
A well presented story that has a good pace and hardly any fillers.
Nice take on morality and a good psychological detective story.
It's quite good, even though it has some faults, but then again, hardly anything is perfect.
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