Watching this over the span of a few days, rather than weekly, changed my opinion a bit, but I'll throw this in here first, so that maybe it can change the minds of a few others before they decide to watch this. I'd highly recommend watching the special "Toki no Asase" or episode 13 as it has been labelled, immediately after episode 4. Why? Well, one of my favourite things in anime is either a backstory, or a side-story that shows you what happened when the characters were off doing something, and you only hear about it.
The reason I find that extra episode so important is because this anime had so much going for it ASIDE from fleshed out characters or any sort of development, really. You don't feel anything if a character dies. Nothing at all. Its like "ah, okay", and that's it. The special episode shows you a scene with a few characters as kids, a scene where some important characters meet for the first time, a scene where the two mains have a sort of bonding moment. This should have been in the anime, so that I felt even a little something when things started to happen to certain characters. To have no impact on me, a person who gets very emotional watching these kinds of things, shows you how one-dimensional all but the two main characters are.
Characters - Not fleshed out so you don't actually care about family drama or sibling rivalry in the way I think the show wants you to care. Plus, at times, they make really dumb absolutely pointless decisions that end up screwing them over. And the key word there isn't "dumb" but "pointless". You're sometimes thinking "wait, what was the point of them doing that?" If you're also looking for at least one good female character, don't bother with this anime. They're all plot devices with short screen-time.
Animation - To continue on with the bad for now, the animation is... quite terrible. The main character is the only eye-candy, let's be real, they give him plenty of scenes where he's very pretty. But that's where it ends.
Plot - The plot isn't anything spectacular. It's a infiltration/revenge story. Nothing more to add to that.
Onto the good.
The main character is very appealing. He's hard not to like. Some may question a decision he makes near the end (I did myself), but despite that, my feelings never changed. The other main character also has some charm. These two are definitely the most developed, and many may find the character of Fango to be entertaining.
It has a really good pace. For the first half of the show, I was wondering if any plot was even happening, and yet I was never bored. It gets even better in the second half.
I'm quite into mafia related media, and I wish there was more anime centred around this kind of stuff, so this was a pleasant surprise when it first came out, and I enjoyed it again the second time around as well.
There's a lil twist which others may not have enjoyed but I did.
Overall, the stuff I feel negatively about actually doesn't compare to the stuff I find positive about this anime, so I'd honestly still recommend it, but ONLY if you watch the special somewhere in the middle.
