The reason why I gave "Mouryou no Hako" such a low rating is because of the scattered narration. I don't think a story should be scattered so much to the point where you have no idea what's really happening until the end. That's just not a great way to tell a story, no matter how "well" the ending might be.
I think one anime I could think on top of my head that does this pretty successfully is "Baccano!". But even when watching that anime, I could grasp what was happening after a couple episodes, and the ending, I understood the whole story (or stories) fully. The characters were understandable, and even with the story line not being linear, the show was still entertaining to watch. Watching "Baccano!" was like being handed jigsaw puzzles piece by piece so that I could put together each information without a lot of confusion over what the full picture looks like.
This anime just doesn't do that. It has a very, very interesting plot (dismemberment, murders, and cults!), but to make an already complex subject even more hard to understand by adding some sort of spiritual force and talks of "reincarnation" is just too much. I know it's based of a book or something, but the contents of a book and an animated show are completely different. There are some things too difficult to animate, and the book probably translated very poorly into the show. Watching this anime was like being handed a bunch of puzzle pieces mixed in with a bunch of unrelated items at the same time and flashing me what the completed product was supposed to look like at the end.
As for the characters, Yoriko and Kanako were both very strange characters. They were a bit irritating to watch, I didn't enjoy watching their conversations; it was just really absurd, and Yoriko's insistence that she was Kanako's reincarnation was not explained at all in the episodes I watched. Even if it was explained later on, it's just not a great idea to execute her character like that and expect viewers to feel like that's something to be simply accepted. Detective Kiba wasn't really that great either. None of the characters left a good impression on me.
As for the art and sound, I can't say much. I'm not too picky on those sort of things as long as the story stands. The characters look beautiful in certain scenes, and the animation seemed average.
I mean, all-in-all, I don't expect every show to spoon-feed the plot to me, but I do expect them to give me something in every episode that lets me understand some of the characters and the story. I just don't think that was achieved in this anime.
