Zankou No Terror. An anime that I have heard much praise from for its fairly unique take on the sensitive subject of terrorism. At first this anime seemed promising. It had a good starting point, a captivating chase for the terrorists, who are the main characters, and it had me genuinely suspenseful for the first few episodes. But then after episode 4 or so, it went downhill.
The two main characters were a fairly interesting duo to begin with. A charming, intelligent "older brother" type leader, "Nine". And a younger partner who seemed more of a follower, "Twelve". Fairly cliche character roles, but it worked well. Unfortunately, the motive they had for their "terrorist attacks" wasn't very well established, which is problematic to enjoying the series. They just had a sad childhood and decided to blow up stuff for fun because they're psychopaths. And their attacks had no casualties, despite destroying entire buildings. That's literally impossible. At least a few people should have been injured, and some killed if this happened in real life.
Anyways, moving one to other characters. One that ended up being a nuisance was "Lisa". She was a generic "Mary Sue" type character and a "damsel in distress" who served no meaningful purpose in the story and just annoyed me. She was always a screw-up who seemed to just be in the way and be a forced love interest for the duo.
I'd say one of the biggest problems that came along was the sudden change in plot. I started to notice many plot ideas stolen from Death Note (which I won't go into too much for spoilers). The duo's back story ended up being generic and as I said before, seemed to take a lot of "inspiration" from "Wammy's House" in the anime Death Note. Another big problem to me was how the series went from the two characters BEING terrorists, to ending up...trying to stop other terrorists? The character "Five" that appears was also from the same setting as them. She's portrayed as being a detective going against them, but is really just another terrorist just like them. Overall, she's a generic antagonist, which makes the plot more confusing. Many parts of this story make very little sense or are ridiculously unrealistic, like the ending, which I won't give away.
Conclusion: If you're looking for a psychological thriller with a deep plot and a well thought out, creative story, go look elsewhere. The first few episodes started off decent, but the episodes after episode 4 or so is when the series started to get worse. Go watch an anime like Death Note or Code Geass instead.
