''Arslan Senki'' started of with a humble first episode and as it was going on everything showed that it was going to be the hidden gem of the spring season (that wasn't so hard though the spring season was horrible). And indeed the first three episodes were more than enough for building the hype. The fights were really good and the story was developing slowly but with a steady and interesting pace and it also set some good questions about religion and war. And few episodes before reaching the middle this series looked like a realistic anime that could be a masterpiece. But only until the middle. Because after that Arslan Senki became entirely ridiculous. Suddenly we had supernatural entities and people who could jump from their horses to the backs of elephants (!). And ok I may exaggerating a little bit too much so let's just say that Arslan is not a realistic anime. That still doesn't excuse the stupid characters that fell to the childish war techniques that the supposed master tactician called Narsus was setting. Neither the fact that after a while we were seeing exactly the same thing!!! Arslan and his gang arrive to a place with peaceful purposes but the king of this country is evil and tries to set a trap to Arslan's army without of course any luck.
Artistically also the anime had a lot of problems. The animation was horrible. Even initially you could say that it was mediocre but at least not so dreadful as it was in the latter episodes. The poor CGI graphics made thing even worse. The soundtracks were good there were some memorable and interesting works. The openings were performed by Uverworld and NICO touches the walls (personal favorite Japanese band) and while good if you have heard other songs from those two bands you will admit that were not their bests. The voice acting didn't have any exceptional performances because the characters didn't have anything interest to make anyone stand out.
Which brings me finally to the characters. Arslan was plain boring as the protagonist. I really hoped for an extremely good development but in the end this development didn't come. Daryun was too perfect for me and Narsus was also boring as hell. In fact the only character that I actually liked was Gieve's character but near the end he disappears leaving us with all the uninteresting characters. The character design was also disappointing. It seemed like Arakawa was trying not to copy FMA's artwork but she ended up copying FMA's artwork after all. Silver Mask while initially an interesting villain as the story progressed he became a cliche villain that you can find in another twenty anime or so.
Ok I know that I shouldn't blame so much Arakawa because she doesn't have any connection with the anime apart from the source material. So in order to be fair I maybe should read the manga because the anime had a really open ending without any resolution. Now if you should watch the anime my answer is no. While it starts really promising the creators don't know what they want destroying this was a story that could be really good. You will not believe that the creator of the manga is also the creator of our all time favorite FMA
