Yumekui Merry, or Dream Eater Merry, is an anime that brings so much to the table, then drops it flat on its head. There was a lot of potential for true greatness here, and I feel like a lot of it went to waste. One main character can see into peoples' dreams, and the other fights off nightmares to save them from losing their emotions entirely. The story is, at least, quite good, and is the main reason you'll want to keep watching; it makes you think, at least, about the potential possibilities for all of the characters, even the ones that aren't very important, which is kind of a good thing.
The artwork and direction are a mixed bag. You'll get some fantastic animation during the fight scenes, and some horrifyingly cheesy direction at some other points. The environments always have a foreboding, dreary sense about them, so much so that it serves the story a little too well and actually distracts from some notes that were meant to be a whole lot more light-hearted. You'll find this a lot in Yumekui Merry, so if your patience doesn't serve you well through the first episode, you're probably not going to fall in love with the series.
The sound work would be decent for something with a smaller budget. Some pretty good BGM and interesting enough voice acting are enough to keep you interested, but not devoted and intent on reading into every word. Ultimately, the voice acting ends up being a little stale at points where it needs to be livelier, which can tear the anime apart from the inside out where it needs to be tighter. Yumeji, the male protagonist, in particular, is really flat for someone who's got so much craziness going on in his life, and even more so for someone who is implied to have a romantic relationship with the main heroine. It all just becomes hard to believe and doesn't take itself seriously at all.
Characters are a redeeming factor here, thankfully. Even if they sound a little flat and emotionless sometimes, it's hard not to remember Merry's signature look. The design looks like a collision of Kingdom Hearts, Soul Eater and Jet Set Radio, if you had to animate it, which leaves a fine lasting impression. However, it's very easy to rely on these characters to hold the whole series together as a result. This leads to a bittersweet conclusion that I felt was inadequate for the time and effort it spent building up to the final moments of the show.
I wouldn't recommend this. Ultimately this series has a lot of redeeming factors that could save it, if the other ones didn't constantly get in the way and seemingly purposefully set us up to knock us down. The end result is broken and muddied, and it's not pretty in the least.
