Now that's out of the way, let's continue.
Let's talk about how I got to the anime anyway. I heard about the game and actually began to watch a playthrough of the game, however I just grew bored because of how much pretty much every single thing was dragged out. Because of this, I took the easy way out and watch the anime instead. However I'm sure the game was great, it's just a bit too wordy and slow-paced than I prefer.
I think one of the reasons this anime gets so much criticism is just because it's an adaptation of the game. It's not 100% accurate, go figure, but think of it this way, if the anime kept every single little thing it had in the game, then the anime would be 50+ episodes long. That's probably an exaggeration, but please bear with me. This is a turn-off for a lot of people, including myself. Remember how I said this was the easy way out? Some people prefer their anime around ten or twenty episodes, mainly because they either have busy lives, short attention spans, or just prefer things go straight to the point. Because of this, the creators would loose a good bit of potential customers just because of that. So I'm glad they shortened it.
However, there's also a few cons to shortening it. There isn't as much character development or any time to get to know the characters. This I don't really like, I feel like they could've extended the episodes to maybe 24 episodes if they showed more interactions with the characters from the game, so I agree with most criticism there.
The art was gorgeous, however I HATED that they simply reused the execution scenes from the game. It was such a cheap copout. I thought they were going to do their own adaptation of the infamous scenes, but they decided not to. I'd rather not think it was laziness because if the creators were truly lazy, they wouldn't have made the anime anyway. Maybe it was for budget problems or they just didn't think it was necessary? I don't know. Other than that, the art was great.
The characters were either intriguing, annoying, or uninteresting altogether. I didn't really find an in between. Because of this, I found it a bit difficult to care for characters that either got executed or murdered. In fact, I only truly liked about four characters. Again, I think if the anime extended a bit, I think I would've gotten a better understanding of the characters and liked them a bit more.
The voice acting was actually quite nice, I don't think there was much room, if any, for improvement there.
In conclusion, I enjoyed this anime very much. It may not be in my top five of all time, but I would definitely recommend it if you want a dark story full of action, betrayal, and, most of all, bloody demises. However, if you're a huge fan of the game, I'd definitely either keep an open mind or skip this anime altogether.
