English is my third language so try to forgive any grammatical mistakes
******WARNING******** THIS REVIEW MIGHT CONTAIN SPOILERS
Joran: The Princess of Snow and Blood started out as a your typical revenge story, Sawa's parents were killed by an unknown person and she seeks revenge from him for that. And the only clue she has about him is the scars (?) on his back that she saw the night her parents were killed.
Story:
If I could summarize the story with one word it would be "Mess". Joran seemed like it had 40 different writers, eacgh with a completely different plot in mind, but at the end they settled for 5 or 6 of them, then they decided to stuff all of these convoluted ideas into the show. You realise that by the time you have finished episode 4. If the show ended by episode 4 my score would be significantly higher and I wouldn't be here writing this. The story in itself ended like 3-4 times before its proper "conclusion" which (ironically enough) is way less conclusive than episode 4. Too many things were left unexplained. Entire characters make no sense. All of the fights are same (literally) so you can't even enjoy the overly-cliche'd part of the story, the action sequences are all as follows: Sawa encounters enemy, enemy beats Sawa, saw uses her blood powers, Sawa turns the fight around. They all go the exact same. If you want you can really skip the action scenes because they are the most boring part (which is hilarious to me). By the end of the story half the cast would have the blue sacred bood somehow even though the clan supposedly went extinct long ago (except for Sawa). Characters
Die on screen then it turns out they are alive with no explanation to anything whatsoever, and it happened so many times that death lost its value. When a character dies I just don't know how I'm supposed to feel. I just go like "oh well they will bring him after 2 episodes or something"
Art and animation :
The characters models are unique-ish but oversimplified which is what would you expect from an original anime so it's not really a major complaint for me, however the backgrounds are so ugly!! There is a reason that the backgrounds are dark most of the time (not only to serve the story theme). It is because they are lazy and they lack substance!. They all feel dead as if it is literally a painting drawn by a middle-schooler but had some polishing after-words.
The colors are very trash in my opinion, when you pair oversimplified but unusual character models with the ugly and dark-y and the oil-y and unfitting coloring you will endup feeling a little nauseous at times.
Animation:
The animation is my personal favorite part about Joran. The animation is really nice. Which puts some worth on watching the action scenes. It's true that it does feel EXTREMELY janky at times (especially in non-action character movements). But for some irrelevant anime that nobody talked or will talk about, and had little to no advertisement. The animation is pretty impressive!
Sound : THE OP SLAPS! IT'S VERY GOOD. ONE OF THE BEST THIS SEASON! The acting is also good but gets old really quickly (somehow). The osts are Meh mostly and the Ed is garbage.
Characters:
YikeS, there are no characters here. Only plot devices. Even Sawa herself is a plot device. The characters just do things, either without a motive, or when they have a motive it is an overused motive like (acquiring the blood) or just a questionable motive at best. When the writers want a character to die they just kill it without no buildup by making character act very irrationally and so out-of-character so that they can progress the plot as they please. They introduce a character and after 10 minutes it's killed. The only okay-ish character would be Jin. his motives make sense. His actions were fairly rational. But he was way too clichéd imo but atleast he isn't bad. But he's way way better than Sawa.
Enjoyment:
Up until episode 4 I had a somewhat decent experience however by each episode I kept losing interest. By the last episode I was pretty much forcing myself to look at the screen. The only episode I genuinely enjoyed after ep 4 was the Jin character arc episode (forgot which one was it)
Overall : too many ideas stuffed into a one-cour show resulted in a hot load of garbage
