Story: 7
Started off really well for me, and throughout the series it was filled with good-natured and on-point humour, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I liked the randomness, it didn't feel forced, and the overarching plot was introduced with some foreshadowing and good transition. The setting (dystopian NYC? Kinda) and subtle world-building were both really fun and I felt comfortable with how each episode combined bits of information that slowly built up the background.
However, I thought it was over-ambitious to try and cover an overarching story yet having a partly episodic theme, all in 12 episodes. From my point of view it was like this anime reached about 75% of its potential, it could've been so much more with more episodes to do certain scenes in more details. The fighting scenes were somewhat too quick and confusing with the big letters screaming at you for attention even though the animation was great. Another problem mostly existed towards the last quarter of the anime - some scene transitions were just too jumpy, and having to try and understand what just happened on screen, is not enjoyable. It's not even that I was trying to understand the underlying concept or guess at the background story, the presented scenes themselves were hard to understand.
Art: 9
Very good, and the character designs are pretty awesome. Impressed with how they did the bigger action scenes, and not much distortions with the art as well. The colours and shadings on the characters are especially nice. Overall just really pleasant and pretty to look at.
Sound: 9
LOVED. I think this is one of the few times an anime's OSTs really struck me (others being Tokyo Ghoul and Gintama). The jazz OSTs and ED gave off a West End vibe, and fits very well with the setting of NYC. Background music eases the audience into the atmosphere and the rhythm fits well with plot pace.
Again, the ED is stunning.
Character: 8
Leo is so freaking precious. Can we show more love for this boy please? He's a bit awkward, very funny, good-natured, determined, not so unlike your typical shounen MC but there's something subtly different about him that I really like. He's not a try-hard, not quite ambitious, very down-to-earth, NOT naive, and very relatable. Not to mention his personality pulled off the relatively plain character design very well. Other Libra members were also really interesting to watch (but there just weren't enough episodes to get to know the majority of them, sadly), and Zapp is fa-bu-lous. His VA is one of my favourites but this character himself is just so entertaining to watch.
Enjoyment: 7
Started off well and ended with a bang. But the progress towards that last bang was underwhelming for me. One of those rare cases where I actually enjoyed the first 75% of the anime more than the last few episodes. This anime is refreshing and entertaining in many ways, but requires much more background to make it rich, so I'll be on the lookout for the second season this year! Anyone reading this, please do give Kekkai Sensen a try!
