The story starts off fairly interesting, painting an intriguing picture for the backstories for each of the show's characters. I thought all of the characters (and there are quite a few of them) were introduced really well, giving us a nice glimpse at their personalities, and their relation to each other. However, the characters don't really go much of anywhere from there. They all end up being very basic one-track characters without much depth to them, and none of them grow alongside the story, either. Some of the characters are written in a really enjoyable manner, such as Isaac and Miria, who provide the comic relief, and some of them are fun to watch on screen, such as the joyfully psychotic killing machine, Ladd Russo. However, the characters (even the ones that I liked), while interesting at first, didn't hold my interest for very long, and about halfway through the series, I had grown tired of most of them.
That's a problem, because the story spends a lot of time focusing on the interactions between the characters. There is a larger plotline, which I won't spoil, however... it's focused on the characters as well.
That's not the real problem with the story for me, though. The problem isn't in the content of the tale (mediocre and anticlimactic as it may be) , but how it's all presented to the viewer. Each episode flips between different timelines of events, many times featuring the same characters, but obviously in different places at different time. They almost never show the time or date of these scenes, so it's completely up to the viewer to figure out which parts took place when and piece it all together. This style of storytelling isn't inherently bad, but in this case it's done for seemingly no benefit whatsoever, as it adds absolutely nothing to the story, just making it needlessly complicated, disjointed, and difficult to follow. Why they chose to present the story in this way is just utterly baffling, and it ruins what would otherwise be a decent tale.
The art is somewhat decent. I liked the art style, and the character designs are pretty decent. There's a lot of moments where it looked really nice, but there's also a lot of limited animation being used, making it feel like it was produced on a somewhat middling budget.
The soundtrack is pretty forgettable, even though I do think the opening is really catchy. I watched it in English, and the voice actors all did a pretty solid job, but it also wasn't anything that blew me away. The overall audio mix and sound effects used were also effective, but wasn't anything super impressive.
Baccano is an ambitious experience, but one that ultimately fails when it comes to it's story, which is poorly told, but ends up being propped up by it's halfway decent cast of characters. Still, those characters eventually lose their appeal, making the second half of the show feel like much more of a slog. Everything else is somewhat above average, but the way the show presents the story just becomes pretty difficult to enjoy after only a few episodes in, and that's a big problem.
Overall, I give Baccano! a 6/10.
