Story
The story, as stated, starts with promise. The war between the Vatican and vampires seems pretty cool and the world the fights take place in is pretty damn awesome. But then about the point where little fairy children called Tinkerbells show up, the series degrades into stupidity, terrible pacing and plotting, and things pop up out of nowhere. For example, toward the end (this isn’t really a spoiler) Abel’s sister explains that their brother is still alive (news to me). This suddenly leads Abel to go after his brother who shows up for the next four or five episodes of the series, despite never being mentioned or showing up at any other time. Nothing is even insinuated before a major plot point happens, it just happens and is shoved in your face. While this may be trying to be surprising, it fails horribly because it is so groan worthy and the characters act so unrealistically toward the plot point.Just watch the last episode where the series tries hard to explain the terrible story arc, but falls apart due to terrible unrealistic actions of characters and no back story or anything to tell us what is going to happen or what has happened. We don’t even understand why Abel and his brother are fighting.
One of the stupidest parts of the plot is that Abel can’t kill anyone (despite killing someone in the first episode). It means really awesome fight scenes degrade into crying and idiocy. Not that there are very many fight scenes in the series, and none are memorable. Even the final fight is totally worthless.
And more plot holes appear throughout concerning Abel. He mentions he can’t swim in one episode after he fell off a cliff and swam to safety in a previous. It’s small things like this that make you wish for something more. It starts promising—so damn promising—but sucks so badly. It gets really bad when a little vampire noble is introduced. Suddenly a romance blossoms between Esther and him, and there is even a point where the story is interrupted by a music video-esque scene of the two looking out a window. It’s so out of place and stupid.
Animation
The animation is not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s not good. Characters don’t look too great, while environments typically look fantastic.
Sound
The main theme is pretty good until the end when it sounds like two or three people are singing it out of synch. The end theme is okay. The music for the show itself is bad, not even likeable. It sounds like the music out of a bad JRPG, like when you are in a town in Final Fantasy or something. The voice actors are competent, though none are outstanding in the least.
Characters
Father Abel is Vash from Trigun. One moment a blubbering idiot who can’t stop eating, the next a total badass. Even the plot is like Trigun with brothers from space fighting each other on a post apocalyptic Earth. Not that Abel is a bad character, he could actually be likeable if it weren’t for the fact he’s a total wuss and won’t kill people. While Vash was like this and promoted the whole “Love and Peace!” thing Abel cries about violence and even in super awesome badass mode he becomes a huge crying wuss.
Sister Esther is likeable at first, but slowly over the course of the series you grow to dislike her more and more as the plot puts her more in focus as a typical anime girl who is trying to hard to help but always fails.
The vampire noble boy I mentioned before is the most annoying character in the series. He likes Esther when he must be five years younger than her. His voice is terrible and raspy. The series focus’s on him toward the end and that’s when the show degrades.
All the other characters are just there and are never anything more than two dimensional. One of the priests at one point before the final fight pulls a locket with his daughter’s face on it out and says something about protecting her, which is news to me. I guess they were trying to add depth to the character, but it doesn’t work and comes off as cheap and stupid.
Overall
Don’t waste your time with this series. I wish it were better because it had a lot of potential, but it degrades crazily over the course of it’s 24 episodes. Once the plot moves into the vampire people’s kingdom and their nobles and things like that, it becomes so boring and it’s a chore just to watch. This is when the characters become groan worthy and everything becomes totally unlikeable.
And after a terrible ending, not an ending like Big O that makes you think or something like that, just a plain old terrible/stupid ending, you feel like there is so much missing. Nothing has really been explained, characters motives are not explained, the backstory is hinted at, and I wish there would have been more of it because it actually sounds interesting, and there are still bad guys alive. While it feels incomplete, for me, I breathed a sigh of relief it was over. I enjoyed the first half immensely, but the last half was so bad and so awful that I can’t even suggest the overall series.
Pass this one up.
