To start with I guess I'll go into the Art. The animation started off really bad, being a mix of poor computer animation and CGI. It gets better right away when they lose the cheap CG fight scenes, but the animation quality doesn't look much better than the first seasons despite them being released seventeen years ago.
As far as Sound is concerned, it's fine. I was maybe hoping for a slightly better soundtrack but it's not bad enough to warrant much criticism.
Finally I want to get into the Story.
I like the plot. Seeing a switch from a tournament to an unstructured conflict between martial artists who escaped death row and the characters we've already come to know is an interesting change of pace. But the narrative structure for this series is god awful. It's just so very, very bad.
I'll admit that the series has always been a little slow paced. There were always flashbacks for each character and other characters commentating on the fights, but there was a good balance. Baki (2018) doesn't have that balance. When characters do fight, there is much less time dedicated to them actually fighting than there is for flashbacks or explaining their weapons. If a fight scene lasts less than half the time it takes for one character to give a science lesson about how he uses wire as a weapon, something has gone wrong.
It's not just that the show spends more time cutting away from fights than it does showing characters duke it out, it's the way the fights are broken up and interrupted. In one episode there is about 4 minutes of screen time of two characters fighting, meanwhile it is broken up in several parts by ten minutes worth of flashbacks, some of which was completely unnecessary.
This kind of story boarding really brings down the overall enjoyment of a series. At this point I feel that because of the slow pacing of Baki, the only good way to watch it would be to wait until it's finished airing and watch each episode back to back.
