There are a few interesting characters in the series but they all end up being characters that you can describe in a few or more words like No Personality McFuckFace (Kobayashi), ace detective (Akechi), disguise guy (Shadow Man), or girl in love with detective (Black Lizard.) I think you see what I'm getting at. They all had one defining characteristic but that was it. There's no depth to any of these characters. Hell even the main villain, Twenty Faces, who was supposed to be a foil to Akechi, had a very flimsy motive in that he didn't have any outside of "people treated me bad."
It feels like there was a lot of wasted potential here. Like it had the potential to be one of the best anime this season but the execution was just so poorly done with a slow story, flimsy characters, and near the end some of the most contrived bullshit I've seen in an anime. I really wanted to enjoy this, and I did for what it is, but the execution was just so awful and was nothing but detrimental to the show.
The art was something. It looked really nice when we weren't getting still frames and outlines of characters that was hard to look at and wasn't pleasing to the eyes at all. It's almost like Lerche blew their entire budget on Assassination Classroom and threw what they had left into this.
One thing I can give this anime is the music. The man in charge of music, Yokoyama Masaru, also did the music for Plastic Memories, Rolling Girls, and Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches. The music in the series was used just to the right effect and some of the songs were truly beautiful. Even the opening and ending songs were, in my opinion, some of the best this season.
So all in all would I recommend Ranpo Kitan: Game of Laplace? Unless you really like detective stories no, not really.
