Story: The actual plot of Hamatora is relatively decent. It centers around the idea that "weak" people envy "strong" people, and what will happen if we empower those "weak" people so that nobody is "weak" or "strong" anymore and everything is on equal footing. The issue, however, is that you have to get through a lot of filler and side-quests in order to get to the actual meat and potatoes of the series. When the show is actually focussing on the plot, it's really good. Now, that's not to say that the side stories aren't worthwhile, because some of them serve as a device to try and fill out character's back stories, but for the most part, it is kind of superfluous to the main storyline, and some of the filler really, really interferes with the flow and suspense halfway through the series.
Art: For a series with a low budget, for the most part, the art was nice and consistent. I did enjoy the art style and the use of colors. Color and texture are definitely used to reflect the mood in this series. There were definitely also scenes here and there where the art wasn't quite up to par, but for the most part, I enjoyed it.
Sound: I enjoyed the opening and ending songs. And then there is a song that plays every time Nice activates his Minimum that I also enjoy quite a lot. It starts to play, and you know that some sort of action is about to go down, and has quite a lot of impact. Other than that, while there were one or two more songs from the soundtrack that kind of stuck out to me, overall I would still say that aside from the parts I already mentioned, there wasn't much that stuck out.
Character: There wasn't a lot of evolution of character or anything like that in this series. Many of the characters don't even have decent back story. It's a difficult situation, as well, in that the two characters I found to be most engaging weren't even technically considered to be "main characters." One would be the head Inspector of the police force, Art, and the other would be the main villain, Moral. Both of these characters, in their own way, were very, very interesting. I won't go into why because I don't want to accidentally spoil anything, but honestly, without these characters present, this series wouldn't even be worth my time.
Enjoyment: I only rated my enjoyment of this series an 8 because, like I've stated previously, when the story is focussed on the actual plot, it's really good. There are a handful of parts where I was kind of bored (though really I would say that I just wanted them to return to the plot), but for the most part I really enjoyed it.
Overall, I had to give Hamatora a 7 because, even though I really did enjoy the show (a couple of the characters in particular), there are some issues with filler and momentum that really count against it. There's also the lack of filling out information about many of the main characters that makes it hard to bond with any of them, thus making it harder to connect to what's going on and what's happening to them.
I would still recommend watching this anime, because it is an enjoyable view, and I will probably re-watch it myself at some point in the future. If you're reading this review after watching Hamatora and you enjoyed it, then I would also recommend Tiger & Bunny, Psycho-Pass, and Get Backers to you. Hope you enjoy~
