At the start I was pretty turned off by the series. I found the lead character, Youko Nakajima, to be utterly annoying. It didn't help any that she cried and cried for like the first 12 episodes straight (okay, maybe 7). But when that was done with, and the new world that we are presented with is explored and explained, things started to look up.
The characters for the most part are pretty interesting. I especially liked Keiki (Youko's Kerin - think man that can turn into what looks like a unicorn), Shouryuu ( King En), Rokuta ( Shouryu's Kerin), Rakushun (a guy that's really a rat) and many more. The characters all have some sort of substance, a majority of them have experienced some kind of hardship. You get to see most of them achieve such sincere growth that I for one couldn't help but to smile at how they turned out after their individual journeys.
The plot of the story is pretty good as well, and the ideas that went into developing the backdrop are to be commended - the author was very imaginative - it works.
However, this series was far too long than was necessary. A few episodes were nothing but recaps of previous episodes, and when i say a few I mean more than 1,2,3,4.... That was annoying and really a waste.
There were quite a few side stories in the entire series (which is good) except one of the most major stories was never resolved. It was simply left...open..I kept wondering if somehow it flew past me and I didn't realize, but after looking back thoroughly, I can say nothing came of it. I am talking about Taiki, the Kirin who disappeared along with his King. This was the start of a great side story, and it was disappointing to see that it wasn't followed through.
Instead of wasting so much film to recap past episodes, surely it could have been used to do better justice to the novel and resolve Taiki's story.
And to conclude, the very last episode was by far the worst episode of them all. All it did was pretty much recap the previous 2 episodes...word for word, picture for picture. If you watch episode 43 and 44, you've watched episode 45. Keiki, who is a very instrumental character, was pretty much left out of a majority of the episodes, and wasn't even granted the respect of being shown at the end.
So, while this was a good story, with awesome characters, it's not a show that I would be inclined to watch again, nor can i say it was enjoyable.
On a good note, I've decided to go out and get the novel. So I guess the anime has done it's job to get me interested in the original source.
