The show started off strong, with various characters being introduced with strange but interesting powers. Put in a Romeo and Juliet like love story in between two warring villages, and you have yourself Basilisk: Kouga Ninpou Chou.
However, after everything was established, I quickly got disinterested with the whole story. This is due to almost all the characters having no depth or worthwhile personality attached to them. Many of them only had cool powers and an unexplained hatred for the other clan. This is one of the most crucial things to making a decent anime, and Basilisk gets it completely wrong. When characters start dying left and right, how am I supposed to feel bad for them if I barely know anything about them? A lot of them don't even have decent character relationships with one another.
This leads to a story that gets increasingly repetitive, which ultimately reduces tension and increases predictability. If you ask me, a show that showcases two clans fighting to the death should create a good amount of tension to get you invested in what is being shown to you. I can't get invested into the story if all I am seeing are these meaningless characters getting killed. If Basilisk focused more on these various side characters, it would have been much better off.
There are a few instances where the anime tries to make us care for these characters, sure, but many of them are not well-integrated into the story at all. Even these few backstories and flashbacks shown don't give us much to grieve upon with these characters, just a bunch of simple stuff that we have seen a million times and done better.
The Romeo and Juliet storyline between Oboro and Gennosuke is handled decently enough. However, it's a Romeo and Juliet storyline, it pretty hard to make a bad Romeo and Juliet storyline considering how many times it has been done before. Hell, two years after this was released, Gonzo produced an actual Romeo and Juliet anime called Romeo x Juliet.
Oboro herself is a pretty okay character. She has well justified reasons for her actions, and has a strong sense of compassion to make up for her lack of physical abilities. I don't favour Gennosuke as much though. He makes pretty confusing decisions, and other than that, he is a stoic character that doesn't talk much, which is pretty run of the mill if you ask me.
I'll talk about one last character before I move on, and that is Yakushiji Tenzen. He is by far the best character in the anime. Talking about him in depth would bring about too many spoilers, but he is very interesting to say the least.
The fight scenes in the anime are pretty entertaining to watch, and the animation holds up during these scenes. My problem with this is the amount and length of these scenes. Given the studio we are dealing with, this was probably the best course of action to have good looking fights but have them scattered around, but I guess I'm a little too greedy and would have liked just a little more. The artstyle is easy enough to look at, and the character designs were also well-done.
As for sound, the only thing really worth mentioning is the OP, which is my favourite part of the show (which when you think about it, doesn't say much about the quality of Basilisk as a whole). I watched the show in sub, and the voice acting wasn't bad, but it wasn't up to par with many of the other things I have heard.
Basilisk is a show that could have been so much more. I really only have one problem with it, which is the characters, but they are handled so poorly that it stems to many other parts of the show, including its story, making it a dis-interesting and borderline edgy mess. I get that the show was moreso trying to focus on the depravity of people when pushed into a situation such as this, but that message gets buried underneath the mountain of underdeveloped characters. I can't recommend this show to anyone really, but if it still piques your curiosity, maybe you will find that you like it a lot more than I did.
