Story/Character:
The story is about a guy named Koyomi Araragi who had survived a vampire attack and is now immortal and gets involved with some weird shit that happens, there's other stuff but I'll let you guys watch the show to see for your selves. Bakemonogatari is one of the those shows that relies on it's characters and it's dialog, there really isn't a whole lot of action in this series and if you don't like to sit and watch two people talk about stuff for 10 minutes at a time then you may not like this series because it's dialog heavy nature is it's biggest turn off, however the dialog isn't particularly bad, it's actually rather entertaining as it's coupled with with some acid trip like art and animation; if you have time to look up at the screen that is. The story is kind of like a harem I guess but not nearly as cheesy and cliche in my opinion. Koyomi doesn't come off as a typical boring character like in other harems and actually manages to have a personality and as for the female lead there is Hitagi Senjougahara who is a self proclaimed tsundere but doesn't really act like, I mean some times she's a bitch but other times she's pretty nice and likable.
One thing that I could complain about in terms of story is how Koyomi's vampire attack is sort of shrouded in mystery and it's not made entirely clear what the the hell happened and it just seems like a piece of missing information to me.
All in all the story and characters were pretty well done but there are more characters that I could mention but I don't want to spoil anything so I just keep it at this for now.
Art/Sound:
The art and animation is kind of like if you were on acid or something but in a good way. This show has a tone of dialog in it but I would call it a talking head show where the characters are just standing around and talking, even though they actually are the art and animation makes the dialog entertaining. I found my self in a struggle between looking at subtitles and looking up at what was going on; on the the screen.
As for the soundtrack, it was really good and it worked well with the animation the opening songs witch they used for each story arc were great but I think the ending song that they used was one of the best I've seen in a while.
Sub:
There is no English at the time of this review and considering that if you don't like reading a lot, I would not suggest watching this.
Normaly I don't have the most positive opinion of subbed anime, I'm very picky and I think most anime sounds the same in japanese and watching nothing but subbed anime is kind of boring, but Bakemonogatari is an exception, not because I could only watch it subbed but because I actually enjoyed it. For me the japanese voice acting for this actually stands out as being good, even though I don't speak japanese so take this with a grain of salt. The anime although being dialog heavy was pretty straight forward which made it a little easier to watch subbed and there wasn't dull moment where I was completely stumped for what was going on.
With that said, really enjoyed watching this subbed and this is defiantly the one of the elite few anime that I thought was genuinely good.
Final Verdict:
I rate this anime an 8/10 though I know it's not for everyone so keep that in mind.
