The overall story is actually good and interesting, at the beginning and again at the end, it was just buried under piles of nonsense and extremely forgettable characters. The story follows Hakuoro, who after being found and rescued by a small village he becomes the leader of a rebellion, emperor of a country and then spends his time fight wars with every other country around.
A major plot twist happens near the end that was so unexpected and weird that my initial reaction was "I am just going to pretend that didn't happen..."and even when it gets explained in the end and you no longer have to pretend it didn't happen, I was still thinking, "it could have been better."
Because there were so many "mini-wars" they all ultimately blended together because they weren't very memorable. Characters were introduced and I had high hopes for what their future actions would be and how they would affect the plot but then the plot would change because of a different war in a different country and then those expectations just crumble into dust. There are some parts of this series that are completely boring as sin.
The character designs are pretty enough, but this series, which is based on war, didn't have any memorable fight scenes of bad-assery. Seriously, even with the flat characters this would be more entertaining to watch if the characters at least could kick some ass in awesome fights. But the fights were boring and predictable. On the other hand, the characters being completely flat doesn't help. It's hard to get excited about a fight if you simply don't care whether or not a character dies.
I always believed that good, well developed characters can carry a plot no matter how contrived it is, but in this case the characters are so bad, you're just sitting there thinking "Who cares?"
Honestly, I really liked the opening song for this anime, so it was my favourite part of watching.
