Normally a show like Juuni Taisen would get quite a low score from me. From very early on you could figure out the order the battle royale was going for, and even if you couldn’t there were plenty of other hints to let you know who would die and who would be the winner. However, I just couldn’t bring myself to hate it. What saved the show from going below 5/10 were the characters. I, like many others, love a good villain, and a show that has such a variety of messed up individuals was able to slightly make up for the lacklustre action and deaths.
For any show to work, it needs interesting characters. For all that Juuni Taisen did poorly, the characters it created were pretty great. Each one is a warrior, doing jobs that no one else could with the lost lives of thousands in their resumes. Of course, not everyone goes about this the same way, and it creates a cast that you want to get invested in even though they'll probably die. You get a deceitful Robin Hood that causes both the rich and poor to suffer, a beast-like soldier that drowns their PTSD in alcohol and blood, and a master manipulator with some special eyes in the sky, just to name a few. Almost every character felt unique in the way they act upon and view their surroundings, making it quite a grim experience as you watch all their planning go to ruin. Even some of the abilities were able to capture my curiosity as I watched them either raise an army of the dead, create poisons and bombs as their weapons or just simply rip people to shreds in a variety of different ways.
Unfortunately, for as much as I enjoyed the characters, the rest of the show just didn't quite hit the mark. For an action show, the fights were so lacklustre. You rarely got to see them battle it out and when they did it felt pretty messy with it either jumping from scene to scene way too much or using off looking CG animation for the characters. To be perfectly honest, the backstories of each character showing them outside of the Juuni Taisen was much more fun to watch than the actual show. They were a perfect representation of how fucked up war is and how it affects people differently, even the ones that you’d think are used to the everyday slaughter. Grief, joy, trauma, ecstasy, and a plethora of other emotions can be found across the cast as they continued their awful ways of living. The only characters that I wasn't too fond of in terms of personality and backstory were Dog (an assassin who specialises in poison) and Horse, (a science experiment soldier afraid of losing) as they felt a bit shallow compared to the rest of our cast, but ignoring them the show really nailed its flashbacks.
So, you’re probably asking how exactly does a show about killing each other work if there isn’t much action, and sadly it just doesn’t. Most of the deaths are too quick and lack impact, with only a few occasional ones that are given enough time to give a little more depth to the characters in their final moments. I get that the show is trying to say that if these people make even just one simple mistake, they could die on the battlefield as quickly as snapping your fingers, but watching such nice characters get such swift ends is just not as enjoyable as it could have been.
I really wanted Juuni Taisen to be amazing, but it just couldn’t reach the expectations I had for it. It was still an enjoyable show, but it could have been so much better if it hadn’t been a battle royale. Give me a spin-off series where it’s just the characters on the battlefield instead of the arena where we watch them do what they do best, and I’ll fall in love. For what I have right now… I’m a little disappointed knowing that recommending it to others will probably just add to the number of people that hate it.
