Review of Devilman: Crybaby

Overall - 4: I felt like this anime was very inconsistent. The tones shift so drastically from scene to scene or even clash within the same scene. Overall to me this anime was a bad experience with some amazing parts. There were some seriously good things about this anime, but I felt like it had more holding it back than pushing it forward. Story - 3: The story was all over the place, pretty poorly explained (until the end where they literally just directly said everything). The way they handled this was terrible. A bunch of fake leads going to dead ends only to have the entire thingbe explained in the end. It felt unsatisfying to say the least, and even though some of the plot was foreseeable, that didn't make it good by any means. The plot did set up for some powerful scenes and commentary on humanity, but it could have tried to be a lot more coherent.

Art - 4:
I personally think a unique art style is inherently better, and in some scenes the art style works, but in others I feel like it detracts from the rest of the show. There were times during fight scenes that I really had no idea what was going on because the way they framed the action was so poor and had so many cuts it was hard to keep up with.

Sound - 6:
Most of the soundtrack isn't that good, but there were a couple good songs that the frequently used well.

Character - 6:
There were characters in this I truly loved and felt like they were written incredibly well, this was most of the characters if I'm being honest, but there were some major things holding back a better rating here.

The first is that the villains in this are evil for evil's sake, which isn't interesting at all. The story didn't handled itself well enough for this to be excused (in the sense that a well written story that used pure evil to say something may be excused for doing so).

Another thing holding back some of the characters from being better is the sudden drastic changes they go through. For example when Akira becomes devilman his appearance (in his human form) changes so drastically he is almost unrecognizable from his former self, and in addition to that he acts completely differently. This essentially kills the Akira we knew for the first 15 minutes of the show, and yet only a handful of characters are very skeptical about the amount of change he went through in one night (and the people who are the most skeptical aren't even the people who know him the best).

Many of the characters in this show act very realistically and the human struggles some of them go through are very compelling. Most of my favorite scenes are distant from all of the fantasy in the show and are just focused on the characters doing human things.

Ryou. Throughout the series I went from dispising his character to disliking it, and this was all based on how the show was portraying him and how the other characters were reacting to his actions. It was beyond frustrating to see him mass murder people in the first episode and have Akira be more or less ok with it. It completely undermined some of the show's later conflict. Overall his motivations were weak, and everyone else was stupid for not seeing how bat-shit crazy he was.

Enjoyment - 4:

I hate gore. There were scenes in this that were just brutal and the only thing that made them watchable was the artstyle, and even then it was hard to look at. There seemed to be at least one of these scenes in every episode, and this certainly made me like the anime a lot less. Aside from that I disliked the plot and was frustrated by some of the choices the characters and writers made. The thing this show had going for it was simple: Scenes so out there they couldn't be anything but funny, Some really compelling character moments (like the rap/poem scene), and some very odd moments of fanservice.