And that's all it is.
Everything else is pure crap.
Art: 9 : My GOD it looks good. Faces, drawings, backgrounds, colours, style, everything is grandiose.
Sound: 8 : The opening alone made Death Parade famous.
Story: 1 : The story is that after you die, some sort of soul judge called an Arbiter takes your soul and tests you to see if you're worth being reincarnated or if your soul should be cast away.
To decide on a judgement, the judge does not make deep psychological analyses, nor does he magically know about the true nature of the people he judges, nor does he have any specific talent at discovering the true nature of people. Actually, he's quite completely fucking incompetent at his job.
The only way to judge people's souls is to put them in painful games to put extreme pressure on them and try and see what shows when they crack under the pressure.
Besides the fact that this is a woefully, absurdly simplistic and insufficient way to truly test a soul's value, the Arbiters are REGULARLY SHOWN TO BE COMPLETELY INCOMPETENT AND TO KNOW NOTHING OF THE HUMAN SOUL.
You have lots of moments where the arbiters are proven to get it outright wrong, and they STILL don't overturn their judgements or anything.
Characters: 5 : You have your prejudiced arbiter. Your generally autismal and aloof, out of the loop arbiter(who happens to be the MC). You have a bunch of arbiters who don't really seem to be caring all that much about the job.
You have one human young woman who is supposedly the other MC, but even though she is the most interesting character amongst the bunch of semi-robots or just uninteresting guys, she still is forgettable.
Enjoyment: 4: I quit this anime after a pretty decent double episode which ended with one of the two judged men torturing the other (yes this anime enjoys its unnecessary gore and pointless violence, too). After the torture started, the second MC human helper to the MC arbiter yelled at him that if you back people into a corner with extreme pressure and do everything to make them break, they'll end up doing crazy things.
To which he reacted with ABSOLUTE SHOCK like his world fell apart around him. What the fucking hell? How removed from logic and basic understanding of the human psyche do you have to be to not realise that WHEN YOU LITERALLY PUSH PEOPLE INTO CORNERS AND INTO MADNESS EVERY DAY?!
So as enjoyment, I'd say that while there is entertainment value here, I spent most of my time waiting for it to get really good, when it almost happened(episodes 8 and 9), it just ended up pissing me off to no end. I watched this months ago and I still am salty at that episode conclusion.
Overall: 2: Lots of other little things bothered me in this anime, most episodes are centered around 2 characters(the judged souls), and 20 minutes is not enough to get emotionally attached to anyone. They just get in, some gorey/unnecessary violent game is played, they get judged and go, and that's a bad formula IMO. The double episodes were much better, but that doesn't change the main issue with the basic premise of having aloof, ignorant robots or prejudiced assholes judging souls, making retarded or ignorant judgements, and go on their merry way.
This anime should be watched only if you want to see something. The key word being see. It's beautiful and promises potential for a lot of future artists(from what I gathered this was made from a project from budding anime drawers and artists), but for the love of everything, never let any of them near a script again. Beauty is not enough for me to keep watching a generally stupid, irrational, small-minded and just infuriating anime.
