I'm kicking off this review by saying that I didn't watch this at anyone's request. A friend of mine mentioned watching it in passing and with nothing else to go on I threw myself headfirst into it.
Pandora Hearts had potential which is a downright shame because it wasted it by veering off into "nothing-is-explained land."
Story: 5/10
The initial premise was awesome. Dark, horrific, desperate. A lot of the story elements in Pandora Hearts are drawn from Alice in Wonderland and twisted into darker themes. The basic premise is that Oz Vessalius, a spoiled rich kid, is thrown into the Abyss which is basically hell. Oz is forced to make a contract with a Chain called Alice to escape from the Abyss, and is captured by the mysterious organization Pandora upon his return.
Unfortunately, the serious themes mostly stop there. Much of the plot is wasted on comedy which is unsuccessfully placed next to a story attempting to also be serious, leading to the comedy ruining the mood countless times. I cringed so much, because they'd have a great scene going and then wreck it with jokes that usually weren't funny anyway.
There was also great potential in Oz's contract. He has a brand of a clock on his chest and when the hand makes a full rotation, he will die. But this never comes into effect during the show. Pandora Hearts ends with the hand on Oz's clock only having made two moves during the entire show. Since this anime ended up different from the manga in its final episodes, the writers could easily have made the clock move more and more and end with Oz's death or the hand making its final turn. In the beginning of the show, Oz and Gilbert were obsessed with trying to find a way to negate Oz's contract so that he wouldn't die, but this issue is abandoned soon enough and never comes into play again.
Pandora Hearts also wasted too much time developing its characters. Now, this normally isn't a bad thing, but it's detrimental when you have a 25-episode anime with no chance of a second season and you instead spend all the time on characters' backstories, letting the plot take a backseat; because the result is well-developed characters that get an abrupt end. The show almost seems to me as if the makers were following the manga all the way through, then abruptly realized they were at 24 out of 25 episodes and were like "Oh shit guess we better wrap this up." That's pretty lazy writing, especially considering manga doesn't have a set amount of chapters when it starts being made, while anime is only licensed for a certain amount of episodes at a time. The point I'm trying to make here is that the manga could afford to spend a lot of time developing the characters and bring the story back later, while the anime can't really do that. Even if Pandora Hearts had gotten a second season, I know from experience that not as many people watch the second season of a show. So spending all your time on characters and pretty much abandoning the plot is a poor choice.
Another issue I had with the story is that it's chugging along, and then shortly before the ending (episode 20 to be exact), there is an absolutely pointless filler episode where Alice gets drunk and a lot of "comedic" nonsense takes place. I was watching this and fuming that they wasted a whole episode on essentially nothing happening. Filler episodes are marginally more acceptable in the beginning of the show, but certainly not at the end.
Because of this poor choice of pacing, the last episode is a terrible ending. It doesn't even have a "last episode" feel to it. It starts out like a typical episode and there's even more of that mood-ruining comedy. Then the story reaches its (pretty boring) climax and it's over halfway through the episode. The rest of the episode is just the characters doing stuff. They even played the regular opening and ending themes during the last episode, which I have come to be greatly annoyed by because it makes it seem like any other episode. Using the opening theme in the last episode is generally more acceptable to me than using the ending theme.
So many questions that were built up in the early episodes are completely abandoned. At the very least they could have attempted to answer some of them.
The issues with the story basically all boil down to better planning. The story couldn't figure out which way it wanted to go, leading to multiple confusing moments. The character development could have been placed so as to cause minimal slowdown issues. Questions could have been answered effectively if the writers had looked up and realized a wall was right ahead and they were driving into it.
All in all, Pandora Hearts had great potential for a dark show that was wasted time and time again.
Art: 6/10
Pandora Hearts was made by a fairly new studio, so the art and animation aren't too great, but they're not particularly bad either. They were pretty average.
The only issue I had with it was the use of fanservice which I thought was pretty poorly placed and unnecessary (then again, fanservice is rarely necessary. But in this story it didn't seem appropriate at all).
Sound: 10/10
Hot damn do I love the OST of this show. Yuki Kaijura, who also did the soundtrack for Madoka Magica, does not disappoint. The OST is gorgeous and orchestral and really fits the dark theme they were originally trying for. You might say I'm biased because I'm a sucker for minor-key orchestral songs, but the soundtrack of this show is really very good. I especially love the watch's music box-esque theme and how they would play it at the very end of each episode.
The opening theme, Parallel Hearts, is badass as hell (though I do wish they had changed it when they changed the ending song because using the same opening while not changing the ending gets pretty old), and the first ending song, Catcher in the Maze, is really pretty and awesome and I especially love the full version. I didn't really like the second ending though, and in my opinion they should have switched the two ending songs, or just not changed the ending song at all.
I also really love the insert song, "Every Time You Kissed Me," performed by Emily Bindiger, that was played during the final episode. I think it's a really subtle and nice touch that the key of the song and the music for it is built around the watch's theme. I also like how they got an American singer to perform the song, rather than a Japanese person singing in English (I'm looking at you, second Future Diary OP).
As far as voice acting, long story short this anime will never get a dub (aside from fandubs), so I watched it subbed. Even though I don't consider myself to be a good judge of Japanese voice acting, I thought the voices in this show were amazing. Oz's voice actress in particular blew me away because I couldn't make up my mind whether it was a man or a woman until I looked it up and discovered that a woman was voicing him.
Oz's voice was the particular standout, but I thought all around the voice acting was really good.
Characters: 8/10
As I said before, most of the screentime of this show was given to developing the characters and explaining their backstories. I think Gilbert especially got a lot of really good character development going on for him. In addition, once Xerxes Break's backstory is explained, he goes from being the ambiguous, quirky trickster to a really interesting character.
I thought a lot of characters weren't explained, however. The white-haired version of Alice that keeps popping up throughout the show doesn't really get much of an explanation and while I do remember her purpose in the show, it wasn't fulfilled in my opinion. Also, Oz's sister, the Baskervilles, and the students at the academy (one of whom was playing the watch's song on the piano; names escape me) didn't get appropriate screentime to explain themselves.
Also, even though Alice is my favorite character in Pandora Hearts, I do agree with someone else's review: the show didn't explore the potential Alice had to be a dark and crazy creature of the Abyss. Once she leaves the Abyss, her sly nature goes away and she's pretty much reduced to a gluttonous tsundere. And I think that's a downright shame considering she could have turned on Oz and Gilbert, or left them to pursue her own ambitions (Like getting her memories back. Could we have an explanation for why they weren't recovered by the end rather than just "well we haven't had any luck with that oh well").
I do like the hinted romance between Oz and Alice, and how it was left open for the viewer to decide if they wanted anything to happen or not.
Enjoyment: 7/10
I took a break after watching the first seven or eight episodes, but quickly marathoned the rest of the show after reading an announcement that the site I was watching it on was shutting down. I probably would have taken my time with this show if I hadn't been worried about losing access, so even though I watched it fairly quickly, I was pretty reluctant.
And I've already mentioned my gripes with the mistimed comedy that resulted in glaring tone issues compared to the story attempting to be dark. That factors into the enjoyment score.
I also noticed a lot of parallels between this story and Fullmetal Alchemist (the manga and the 03 anime), which didn't help my enjoyment levels, since I enjoy FMA so much more.
Overall: 5/10
It's kind of unfortunate that at one point in the show I was considering scoring it a 9, then it ended up as a 5 ultimately.
The story is pretty shabby and the show leaves a lot of holes and hanging questions, but the characters were overall pretty solid and the music fantastic. So I'd recommend watching Pandora Hearts if you have spare time on your hands. It's not really a priority.
