STORY:
The overall setting of the story is in a city known as Ergastalum which is ran by various gangs/mafias, and the police have little control of what goes on. As you can imagine the city is rife with prostitution, drugs, and murder, all the standard stuff for a mafia ran city. If you want a tale that ends in a happy ending with rainbows and glitter then this is certainly not for you. Overall the tone is pretty grim, if you've seen it,(Which I will assume so since both are targeted at very similar audiences) think "Black Lagoon with superpowers". The story pacing seems rather good with a good balance on pushing the story forward and character development.
ART:
The art was well done but fairly generic, likewise with the animation. I did enjoy the backgrounds depicting how run down the city was and how the colours were subdued; it was very rare to see a vivid red or blue, with a larger focus on black, brown and grey as standard colours. Visually the character design was solid too, no generic, pink haired, tsunderes. We instead get a great variety of character models, which all vary without being too flamboyent. A little thing I loved regarding the art, is that the weapons used arent so unfathomably outlandish that they couldn't be used, a katana is just that, a set of short swords is just two short swords and nothing else; While this may not mean anything to some people it was just something I liked that they kept things simple here to keep with the tone of the show.
SOUND:
Sound didn't stand out really, I didn't ever catch myself listening out for the OST. In regards to sound effects, they were solid and even without speaking Japanese myself, I found the voice acting for the deaf character was spot on. The intro was damn good though.
CHARACTERS:
I spoke earlier in the art section abput the visual character designs, and how they were well varied without seeming outlandish, this is eaqually as true for the characters themselves and their personalities and quirks. I particularly liked how the characters with superpowers (Called 'Twilights' in the anime), are lacking something in exchange for gaining their powers,for example some are deaf, some don't physically age. The reason I brought this up is because so far it has stopped any of those "I'm going to lose, better power up to SS15/Hyper-Bankai/Mega-demon-fox-mode!" moments, by giving said characters a handicap in a particular area. Characters that don't posses superpowers aren't left out in terms of development though, with flashbacks showing us that many of them have dark pasts and while I feel that some of the supporting characters could have been developed further it was only a 12EP season, so the overall balance was good and the main characters were developed enough for me to feel invested in.
OVERALL:
All in all I feel that 'Gangsta.' was a solid entry to the line up of that season, I had no arguments with it except that there wasn't more of it and I feel that it would have benefitted from having a 24 episode season provided that it was 24EPs of what we had in the first 12. I believe that if you liked Black Lagoon or Jormungand, you'll probably enjoy this series, the story is heading in an interesting direction and should it get a second season you'll definitely have something to look forward to in the future.
