Review of Durarara!!

Watched the dub so that's what I'm reviewing. The anime often shows you seemingly useless information, and at times following the flashbacks are very hard. The first few episodes were very slow, and not that engaging, and while it finished very well, the journey to that was less engaging. The story and character interactions are very well strung together, perhaps too well at points, the flashbacks are sometimes a little hard to follow and the un centred nature of the anime made following the plot sometimes challenging. This anime isn't something that you can really attach 'antagonist' labels to something, while it's an understatement to say it'smostly the characters messing around with each other - it's probably a good summary.

The animation wasn't particularly high quality. The greying of non important characters was fine really, and helped you focus on what you were meant to, but most of the quieter scenes were animated very basically. Not so much as to detract from the story, but it lowered the engagement nonetheless.

The voice acting in the dub was very good, but the sound tracks were very heavily over used and to me they were getting cliché by the end, such was the number of times I had heard them.

I also personally didn't like the narrative style. Often what a character was thinking was literally said out loud, and the actual narrator was sometimes a character from the story and sometimes external. Without a very good ability to memorise an attribute the voices, following who was narrating what was hard, and the style of the fairly frequent narration lost any implicit messages. Everything was dictated to you like they didn't want you to miss it, and while all this information tied up brilliantly towards the end, it felt a little forced to me watching it at the start.

The style of pulling a surprise back story out of nowhere didn't really bother me, nor so much the characters/plot itself, more so the way in which it was presented.

While the animation quality might be quite low, and the episodes at the start aren't that engaging, the anime does tie up nicely and deliver on the ending.