Set in a city where a small group of people with superpowers - called Minimum Holders - exist, the story follows a detective agency called Hamatora, a detective group made of Minimum Holders. Each episode we follow Hamatora solving various mysteries, always caused by another human who posesses Minimum Holder powers. Art, a superintendent of the police, usually cooperates with them to solve the cases, while it turns out that there is a mastermind behind all these mysterious happenings.
The story of Hamatora really isn't bad - each episode we get faced with a new detective case for our little detective group, and we follow them solve the cases and doing some fighting with their cool Minimum Holder powers. Here and there, we see some hints of an actual plot, which then gets fulfilled during the final few episodes. It could have been developed so much better though.
The first half of Hamatora (with the episodic short cases) was okay in the aspect that it also presented the antagonist and gave a small development up to the final conflict. The problem here is though that the time was not used effectively. Character development was close to zero, and instead we were presented with some filler-like episodes. Like the beach episode, which was used after a quite dramatic development, which was just completely out of place. And don't even get me started on episode 5, honestly.
The last few episodes focus on the actual "plot" of the series, as already mentioned. It definitely is better than the first half, as the plot thickens and the episodes focus on the main conflict. Sadly we get fed up with an extremely disappointing conclusion, which leaves questions open and brings the story down. Additionally, at some point you aren't really interested in following the story anymore and lose interest more and more as the story progresses. This is mostly due to the extremely weak characters.
And this leads me to my next point - the characters, which make up the weakest part in this series. As I've said, with the exception of some backstory hints, there is no real development and we don't get to know much about them. Hell, if they weren't called names like "Birthday" and "Nice" I don't think I would be able to remember much of them. Nice has some backstory, and characters like Murasaki, Art and Three also have some hints on their past here and there. But the rest gets left in the dark.
Especially characters like Koneko, Hajime and Master could have easily been left out in their entity and the story could still progress the same, as they don't play any role in the main plot. At all. Maybe they play a bigger role in the manga or the upcoming video game - at least in the anime, they are completely useless.
Finally there is also our "bad guy" Moral, who makes quite an underwhelming enemy character. I felt his reasoning for being the bad guy was quite a disappointment - you would expect so much more.
Overall, since we barely get to know anything about the characters - thanks to the aforementioned use of filler-like episodes - so we are presented with characters that we can't relate to or connect with at all. I think this also plays a part why the enjoyment is so little - at some point you do not really care how the story progresses anymore since you can't really feel anything for the characters.
The art is one of the more positive aspects, the character design is good and as I've already mentioned, the fighting scenes in their full colorful glory were quite a please to look at. The animation was okay too most of the time, though there were some episodes with lots of quality issues present. The music was decent too, with nice opening and ending songs.
But of course, some art and music don't make an anime, which now leads me to my overall opinion - Hamatora could have been a good and fun show, as the flashy visuals and the superpowers surely pique one's interest, but was brought down by an average plot and unrelateable characters. All this together results in my final score 4/10.
