Story - 8
The story in this show follows our main character Narumi. His detective brother Kiyotaka randomly disappears and leaves his wife and brother behind with one big case. "The Blade Children". Every episode delivers a great, attention grabbing story and really develops as time passes on. It gets you thinking every episode on how Narumi will solve all these puzzles and if he will.
Every episode feels like something new with all different kinds of puzzles and mysteries to entertain you and catch your attention. It wasn't just about the mysteries though as you would learn more and more about the past and the present. It really immersed you into the show when watching it.
Now this show seems absolutely amazing right? Well it is up until the ending. The show explains nothing at the ending and leaves all sorts of questions leaving only the manga to answer them. Some REALLY important questions like "Who the hell were the Blade Children anyways and why does everybody want to kill them so bad"?
Overall the story was masterpiece level until that end part.
Art - 7
I don't really have much to compare it to but I'll say it looks good for 2002. There weren't any scenes where I would say "This looks terrible. I hate it and I can't even tell what's going on". But there weren't any scenes where I would say "This scene needs to be hung up in an art museum and sold for $1,000,000". Either, so I'd say it looks good enough.
Sound - 7
The sound in this show was pretty good, I find myself listening to this show's music from time to time. Voice acting in this show was also pretty good and there weren't any flaws in the sound. The opening song was pretty good, it could use a better singer but it was fine enough. The ending song was great, that ending song makes me want to re-watch spiral with that soft guitar, drumming and whatever other instruments were used in making it. Background music was fine. It was usually a mysterious electronic kind of song but there was also more variety like piano. The voice acting was good too, nothing sounded out of place.
Overall I liked the soundtrack of Spiral there was sad music, happy music, mysterious music and all kinds of music to build the shows atmosphere
Character - 9
The characters were probably the best part of the show along with the mysteries and puzzles. All the characters were either really likeable or well-written. Every single character in this show was great.
Narumi was an excellent mystery solver and was a great protagonist for this show. He almost always solved any mystery or puzzle thrown at him and was pretty chill too.
Hiyono was a cute and likeable sidekick who managed to help Narumi on all these puzzles and was like the researcher character with a lot of knowledge on things even Narumi wouldn't know.
Most of the Blade Children were pretty great too, getting a bunch of development throughout the show going from fighting Narumi to becoming friends.
Even the supporting characters got good enough development in the episodes they were shown in. There were absolutely no bad or mediocre characters in this show.
Overall the characters were all well-written and really likeable. There weren't any bland characters, annoying characters, generic characters or any of that. All of them were unique in their own way.
Enjoyment - 9
Spiral really never failed to entertain me; it always kept my attention with all the mysteries and puzzles. Hell even the scenes without any mysteries or puzzles going on entertained me because the characters were just that likeable. I never zoned out while watching this show. It was hard to zone out when Narumi's on screen solving all these puzzles with things I probably would've never thought of before.
Overall - 8
I think Spiral is a great show for fans of mystery. It just excels at everything! (Except that ending). Too bad this show just doesn’t get enough attention
The good
-Story
-Characters
-Music
-Mysteries
The bad
-Not much explained at the end
