STORY:
Nope, I don't think [C] was originally planned for more than 11 episodes and cut short eventually, just to let some of the supporters of the show know. The writers themselves should have known that anime in the noitaminA slots, for the past few years, have always been 11 episodes long (what a strange number).
So what contributed to the subpar story quality of the series? Lack of proper planning. The writers were too ambitious and tried to incorporate too many things into such a short span of time at once without thinking how are they going to write all of them out. And what do the audience receive at the end? A show with a magnificent setting but bad pacing.
And I am not kidding here. The first few episodes were indeed good, the flow of the story was smooth and make you want to watch more and more. But came the infamous Episode 8, where one of the protagonist of the series suddenly turned to the evil side and the story was suddenly rushed. Most of the loose ends earlier in the series were not explained, a lot of time was devoted to the 'main plot' which started from that episode and left viewers with a big question mark on their heads at the end of Episode 11.
UNLESS, and I say unless, that the writers are planning to pull a Eden of the East on us and make a movie expansion to explain everything in this 'social commentary + Yu-Gi-Oh' series. I would probably forgive them for these loose ends then. But judging by the ending in Episode 11, it would be difficult to elaborate more on the story anymore.
ART:
Need I say anymore about this? Oh, I shall then.
[C] has probably the most fail story of all anime in 2011, but its art is probably the best of the year. Msyu's attacks, the skyscrapers of Tokyo, even every inch movement of the convenient shop colleague who our main protagonist works with, were animated with great effort. Not to mention the awesome CGI that keeps the battle scenes rolling on. It keeps me wondering how the hell did the sponsors come up with the animation budget...
...until the very end when I realized that they sacrificed the money from the screenwriter part for this. Lol.
SOUND:
Again, [C] shines at this. I particularly love those few soundtracks used during the battle scenes. Made the tension during the duels even more nerve-wracking. The OP and ED, not to brag, are really superb.
Yay for Haruka Tomatsu as Msyu too. Her voice acting deserves a mention.
CHARACTER:
Throughout the whole series, the only characters who really had any development were Msyu and Kimimaro. Oh, you may argue that they are the main characters and deserved more development, but mark my words: devoting all the time for main characters and none for the supporting ones is normally not a very good idea.
And it's proven. The other characters had so much potential to be great characters, but were shoved away at the very end. Soichirou, for instance, was doing nothing until Episode 7, when we finally see a bit of his backstory, and at Episode 8, when he had a bit of development at least. But that only lasted for 3 episodes. The blonde chick was another fail example. She was also doing nothing until Episode 10. Heck, need I mention my favorite character Masakaki? He could have made such a good antagonist!
OVERALL:
I won't force you not to watch the series if you want to watch it, but for me, [C] is an anime that I would probably recommend it to those who were only watching it for the art and the music. Let's hope that the writers would know better what to do next time when they are planning a new anime series.
