Story: The plot progresses in the usual shounen way: The weak and optimistic protagonist trains, and starts fighting enemies who seem much stronger than him, and once he defeats them they often become his allies. The first 20 episodes were fillers, but since I found them funny I didn’t really mind. The battles drag out a bit sometimes, but they are well done in general and there’s enough suspense to keep the viewer interested. The biggest problem however is the filler episodes; they were initially funny, but the same jokes keep getting repeated again and again and it becomes annoying fast. Even without talking about the recaps, some episodes were just completely unnecessary, like before each battle they have at least one episode where the characters just encourage each other and talk about the upcoming battle.
Characters: The cast seems pretty diverse, but all the characters can fit in an archetype in some way or other. They gain maturity and confidence during the battles, but it seems to revert once the battle is over, and they are back to repeating the same catchphrases again and again. Many of the jokes are based on character antics, but after 200 eps, it becomes really predicable and repetitive. Another thing that really bothers me is the female characters; even though some of them are strong, their strength is nothing compared to the male characters, they hardly participate in battles, often can’t do anything without help from the males (Chrome, cough* cough*). And while it is important to have a female character who can’t fight but serves as moral support, having two of them is way too much especially when one is portrayed as very annoying and immature. Many of the characters who don’t fight are very uninteresting; Despite tagging along for 200+ episodes and getting a lot of screentime, they don’t get character development at all. Hibari Kyouya was especially poorly written; he is some lone wolf who practically wins every battle in 1 min without effort or remarkable injuries, and he doesn’t have character growth at all. In other words, he can be easily qualified as a ‘Gary stu’.
Art: While the character designs are interesting, the art is very inconsistent. It improves through the series, but was never really detailed and every once in a while it is still possible to see poorly drawn frames without pausing the video.
Sound: The osts were decent, but they get kinda annoying after being repeated 98343981 times, especially when you can easily predict when they will be played. Most of the openings and endings however were pretty good and original. The seiyus’ voices fit the characters well, but some of them may annoy you, like Haru and Lambo’s.
