Reviews

A MASTERCLASS in thriller, suspense, and mystery that keeps subverting your expectations and astonishes you with clever twists and turns. The tension and pacing is the best I've ever seen in an anime period. I've never seen a detective/crime thriller series be so hot on the trail so quickly while keeping the tension through the roof. The climax in crime thrillers is piecing together evidence with the main question being "who is the villain?". Usually this is a big twist, someone we'd never suspect, but this series inverts that! We know who it is right off the bat, and since they are the main character(Light) the question becomes "how would I not get myself caught?". It gives off a sneaky "prison escape" vibe that can't help but make you cheer for Light's attempts to ward off inspections.

How would you investigate someone who has the power to kill just with a face and name? Odds are you wouldn't want them to know, you'd want to do it very secretly and pretend that you don't suspect that person at all so that they'd slip up and let their guard down or eventually have them trust you by being friendly and acting like you stand for their ideas. This is one of the many thing Death Note subverts and the tension keeps on ramping up. You'd think catching someone who can kill anywhere in the world would take forever to track down but within 2-3 episodes, it already narrows it down quite a lot. Episode after episode I am awestruck by how the author writes L and Light to be 5 steps ahead of the reader.

The soundtrack is is to die for as well! Sadly the composer got caught with weed and japan unfortunately takes weed needlessly seriously so we might never get to see the composer do another work. I hope he finds his footing, I still listen to it quite a lot when working.