The story is pretty generic. Teenager (of course) gets thrown in a deadly situation, sucks and gets his ass kicked, BELIEVES IT, and then gets stronger. The world it creates is pretty interesting, if you forget about the prison being an amusement park where prisoners are murdered for entertainment, and it has some decent character building. It's so stupid though. The whole "torturing prisoners" thing could have been turned into a pretty decent exploration of ethics and humane treatment, but it was a fucking amusement park. It was just a little too silly for me. The plot gets a little convoluted later on and then shits the bed in the last few episodes with an incredibly unsatisfying ending.
The art is pretty generic but is at least fairly well animated. As I said before, the soundtrack is really kick-ass. I need more anime in my life with death metal soundtracks. The very Cannibal Corpse-esque music playing during the Carnival Corpse absolutely made my day. The OP is decent and with the exception of the ED all the other music used is really kick-ass.
The characters were shit. All of them. Except maybe Crow. He was pretty baller. Ganta was definitely the shittiest character in the entire show, which is unfortunate because he's the main character. He's a whiny, useless, dipshit. It's like if Shinji from NGE and Simon from the first few episodes of TTGL, were combined to form the ultimate waste of space. All of the other characters are either painfully edgy or painfully stupid, or both.
I enjoyed the fuck out of this, until the last few episodes. It was stupid and edgy, so I had a laugh at its expense, and it was fucking brutal. Then the story started getting even more stupid and the last couple of episodes, on top of being a clusterfuck, answered nothing and left me entirely unsatisfied. I finished the last episode and felt that it had not been worth it to watch that entire show just for it to end that way. It's almost like it expected a second season so it left all the loose ends to be tied up later.
I would recommend this to anyone who enjoyed Hellsing Ultimate, Mirai Nikki, or Tokyo Ghoul ... as long as you drop it before the last couple of episodes.
Overall 4 branches of sin out of 10
