Story:
The premise of Vatican priests checking possible miracles on their authenticity is a very interesting one with tons of possible ways it could have played out. The most obvious choices would have been to either make it like a detective story or to go all out and into the supernatural. Vatican Miracle Examiner leans more towards the former, though the possibility of a supernatural (or in this case divine) explanation for the phenomena is always kept open for as long as possible. The religious belief of the main characters makes the whole thing a lot more tolerable than the usual way of putting normal people into extreme situations and them suddenly believing that things exist that no normal person would believe in that easily. However, there are two severe problems this show has story wise. The first is the pacing, which is way too fast. Within only 12 episodes we get three different cases and two standalone episodes with rather complex revelations and executions. This makes it hard to follow more often than healthy and it also causes the second problem. The solutions feel like complete ass pulls. If you have a hard enough time to understand what’s going on, it’s not possible to grasp a bizarre twist ending. All it does is making it seem like a really bad mystery show, which it technically is not. In fact, if they had taken their time to explain the details of the cases better, it would have been a great mystery crime-drama, but what came out is a messy, too ambitious for its own good anime about homoerotic priests and insane supervillains. It’s still fun, it just could have been much more than that.
7/10
Art:
This anime looks pretty good. The characters have a realistic look to them, though they have been prettified a lot, most likely to get the shounen ai crowd to check this one out. But it’s not like it’s pure Fujobait or anything, it’s still far away from stuff like Nanbaka. The colorization looks great, many of the backgrounds have a photorealistic feel to them. There seems to be some work done in researching locations, because at least the German village from the final episode looks way more real than usual. The animation is simplistic, but there isn’t much action to animate to begin with, so it doesn’t stand out. What really irritated me however were the camera angles and cuts. The camera seems to keep moving nonstop and rarely is a scene more than two seconds long before a cut is made. On top of that, many, many, MANY Dutch angles are used. That combination makes for a rather nauseous viewing experience and heavily disturbs the flow of the anime by distracting from its contents. Sadly, this outweighs most of the good things they did stylistically by a quite an amount.
4/10
Sound:
The opening song is pretty cool, it has somewhat of a Gregorian feel to it, but it’s not really a choral song or filled with organs or anything else you might link to Christian religious music. It’s also quite intense and hectic, which fits the fast-paced cutting of both the opening and the show itself. The ending song is a nice, calm one, that is fittingly accompanied by imagery of what I assume is Rome. Very relaxing and smooth, I like it. It has a less poppy sound than many other anime endings, which is always welcomed by me. All the voice acting was solid and fitting, they even managed to nearly properly pronounce German, Italian and Hispanic names, which I’ve heard a lot worse in other anime. Soundtrack and sound effects were acceptable, though a little cheesy at times. That’s not really much of a problem though, since the show does not seem to take itself too seriously either quite often (at least that’s what I hope).
8/10
Characters:
The two main characters were surprisingly likeable. I expected a pair of homoerotic zealots, but they were pretty down-to-earth and logically thinking. Roberto is a widely read intellectual who has the historic and mythological knowledge to lead the examiners on the right path to the solution, but he is not a cold-hearted thinker. I mean, he is a god-fearing priest after all. Despite his thirst to learn more and more, he is not easily tempted by worldly things. Joseph on the other hand is the more emotional of the two, but also the more sociable, so when it comes to getting information from people directly, he is the man. They make a great investigational duo and help this anime not to fall off the edge so quickly when the story aspects fail to keep your attention. There are very few other recurring characters, but the focus is mostly on Roberto and Joseph so they don’t get much of a characterization. The same goes for the story specific characters, again resulting from the outrageous pacing this show has. Julia (who is a guy, who the hell was in charge of naming?) is an interesting and mysterious person, who I’d have preferred to be explored in more detail, but again, we only get a glimpse of who exactly he is. At least in his case, this adds to the mystery, still I think he could have used a bit more screen time or being discussed about.
7/10
Enjoyment:
The early stages of the individual storylines were pretty exciting, I like myself a well-structured crime story, but as I said, the further they went into it, the more confusing and inane it became. It was still enjoyable for its partially ludicrous reveals, but that’s not what I think it should have been. I am okay with the backgrounds behind the stories, but please, slow it down and follow a line of logic on your way to solve the case. There was a lot of potential wasted trying to accommodate all this into a one-cour series, it would have been better to either tell less stories or have a longer runtime (with the first solution being the more probable in terms of execution). As it is, Vatican Miracle Examiner is an okay anime with serious problems, yet still kinda enjoyable in its uniqueness.
5/10
Overall:
6.2/10
