To start off with the characters, our hero Alucard feels like the epitome of what it means to be a mary sue. Does he have character traits which define him? Of course not, since he is nothing but an underdeveloped, unbeatable, one dimensional mary sue who does what he wants and what he pleases because the plot said so. Is he able to be beaten? Yes, but only when the plot needs him to stray away for a while, then after that he comes back because he is supposed to be an immortal vampire who never dies because of plot, even when the other characters beat him fair and square through a smart strategy they had developed early on. Speaking of the other characters, they exist just for the sole purpose of moving the plot forward all the while being one dimensional archetypes themselves. You’ve got the central villain, Major, whose only character trait is to be evil and speak in a funny German accent just to get some cheap laughs from the viewers. You’ve got a woman who owns Alucard and is supposed to be his master, and her character is never developed other than her being his master, and to drink wine and speak in a posh accent I guess. She was so forgettable, to the point where I forgot her name. The other characters are the same, they either exist for the sole purpose of telling an unfunny joke, or to progress the plot forward without gaining any real characterization in the process. Reading some of the reviews here, they rave about the greatness of the characters, yet they never go into specifics as to why said characters are so great. I wonder why…
As for the unfunny jokes, this Anime is filled to the very brim with them. Were you hoping for a serious and grim Anime about vampires and soldiers fighting each other to the death? Jokes on you, we’ll give you the silliest, most addlebrained “comedy” Anime that ever tried to take itself seriously. Even when it should be funny and invoke laughter out of the audience, it doesn’t do anything of significance nor does it succeed in getting said laughs. Moreover, the juxtaposition between comedy and seriousness completely breaks the audience’s immersion in the plot, as one cannot be invested in a serious scene because the Anime breaks the viewer’s immersion and the serious tone that it was going for with unfunny jokes that come out of nowhere. Seriously, the comedy displayed here is worse than that of Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood, and that is genuinely saying something. To put it in simpler words, the Anime does not know what it wants to be, because if it’s goal was to be a hysterical parody of vampires, then it has certainly failed in it’s goal, since it neither is funny nor does it not break that rule by trying to take itself seriously half of the time.
Moving on to one more problem that this unfunny sack of underwhelming doodoo suffers from, it is that the episode length is long. There is a reason one watches Anime, and that is because while it not being the best medium out there, it at least makes up for it by not torturing the viewer for more than twenty minutes at a time. What does Hellsing Ultimate do? It lengthens it’s twenty minute run per episode into forty slow and lengthy minutes, which boggles the mind since ten minutes of this catastrophe were unwatchable, much less forty. Even when sped up, it doesn’t help either since you are constantly seeing characters you dislike being shoved right into your face all the time. You can’t escape this terrible catastrophe no matter how hard you tried, as it is inherently bad by itself.
Overall, there isn’t much else to say about Hellsing Ultimate. It is boring, trite, unfunny and at the end of the day it is meandering. Why is it meandering you ask? Because the main character is an unbeatable mary sue who barely shows any emotions and the outcomes therefore become predictable.
