Let's just get some of the obvious stuff out of the way. The animation for this series was just not there. All the characters looked plain and uninspired, the posing and movement was stiff and lifeless, lots of reused scenes and no visual flare to speak of. A lot of times, characters lacked expression too, which is very important in a thriller. Seriously, it feels like for the most part, they did the absolute bare minimum to get the point across. So expect a lot of by the numbers shot-reverse shot dialogue sections, lots of still frames and minimal movement outside of action scenes. The studio can be damn thankful that the story is more than good enough to make this worthwhile and that the music and especially the voice acting did A LOT of heavy lifting to make this come together. Trust me, were this a lesser story, this anime would've been relegated to a dustbin right away.
Right, let's get into the good stuff though. The Fable is another awesome entry in the growing genre of "former Yakuza/hitman tries to live a normal life, but his past keeps catching up to him" alongside other series like Gokushufudou or Sakamoto Days. It's also great how, despite sounding very similar on paper, all of them have a very different approach to their story and are very distinct from one another and any other series out there. The Fable is absolutely brilliant in the way that it manages to balance comedy, action and tension. There's lots of jokes and many scenes got a good laugh out of me. Despite this, it also weaves a fantastic yakuza crime thriller in there too and both aspects only serve to enhance each other. It's a very delicate task to try and make your audience laugh, while also consistently keeping them on their toes at all times but dammit, it works! The fight scenes are also handled very uniquely, without prolonged exchanges of blows but instead were these physical games of chess, focused on very cerebral decision making between highly intelligent characters. Without gratuitous inner monologues, we get battles of wit punctuated by lighting fast John Wick-style showdowns. In a battle of professional assassins, the outcome can be decided in the blink of an eye, so every moment counts.
This brings us to another of the core strengths - the characters. It's often a slippery slope and quite hit or miss when anime try to have highly intelligent characters. However here, this is done wonderfully. Characters who are meant to be clever actually feel that way and the decisions they make are logical and creative. The outsmarting going on is very engaging and adds to the great sense of anticipation during every direct conflict. The way Fable also uses his genius in his field to handle every situation while keeping his promise not to kill anyone is thoroughly fascinating. Beyond conflict though, the characters are also all very charismatic, engaging and interesting. All of them have depth and a mixture of realistic, believable flaws, all sprinkled with just the right amount of exaggerated absurdity to make them slot right in with the overall comedic tone of the story. They absolutely steal the show and this makes this overall very dialogue heavy series never drag or feel dull and as I said earlier, the fantastic voice acting carries a lot of the weight in order to make the whole experience come together well. I mean, both Kenjiro Tsuda and Takehito Koyasu showed up, so we've checked all the boxes of making a proper yakuza thriller.
Overall, I enjoyed what I saw from this anime, but there were definitely glaring flaws. The story is excellent and unique and the characters are easily the greatest thing about it, but I can't lie, the really cheap visuals detracts greatly from the experience. The stiff and janky animation makes the emotional scenes less impactful than they should be and the dull, generic, bright colour palette used detracts from the cool neo-noir atmosphere that I feel befits this kind of story. Were this tale less exciting than it was, this anime would've been given no more than a 5 on here and it would've been swiftly forgotten about.
My final verdict is that this is still an enjoyable experience overall and still worth a watch, but I'll definitely be deferring to the superior manga for the full story. If and when this gets greenlit for a second season, I would very much rather a different more passionate studio be given the job.
TLDR: Божката пука/10
