Review of Monster

Monster, a highly acclaimed anime by the people that have watched it. Does it deserve it? Well, overall, I think that mean score should be around 0.2-0.3 lower. Also, minor spoiler warning. We see the main character, Tenma, go on a gruelling journey as he attempts to end the life of someone he saved in a surgical operation years ago, due to the huge numbers of people they had killed and possibly will kill. I found this burden on him quite sympathetic: this burden that every time someone is killed by him, Tenma indirectly counts himself responsible. However, for the rest of this journey wesee him stay his usual gloomy, depressed self as he meets people and saves their life after he slightly helps in endangering it in the first place. I really wished that he were more of a compelling character, being the main character and all that, or if any of the slight developments ,through the various people he meets, that happen to him actually stick.
The next thing is the various people that he meets. This takes up a huuuuuge part of the story, and I did quite enjoy their subplots and their slight impact on the story, but by slight I mean very, very so, because their impact on the story, while existent, could have been made through other shorter ways and could have been maybe even been compressed into the actual main characters.
The premise of Monster was alright. There were some interesting themes and philosophical concepts that were introduced at first. However, I sort of felt that these slowly started to slip away as the story progresses. One was the concept of everyone’s life being equal and we don’t really see that play a role until it is mentioned in the last few episodes once or twice.

Now that I have angered enough people that believe this to be a masterpiece, let’s get on to why I didn’t rate this any lower.
The mysteries in Monster are quite well set up. The small bits of information that you get from all those characters might help you to build up a conclusion in your head, but that might fall apart with the next piece of info! This does happen over quite a long time and the pacing is another one of my lesser liked aspects of Monster, so this was not a complete positive in my opinion.
The music wasn’t very loud, so not very noticeable but I remember hearing some small, eerie parts. I even went back to listen to their full versions on Youtube and they are quite good and suiting for Monster. The art isn’t exactly your typical bling-bling pwetty UwU thing that was even more popular at the time and that is really for the better, seeing as this is a very mature and psychological show.
To top it off, there’s Johan, that guy Tenma’s trying to kill. Not really a spoiler, don’t worry. This was clearly established around the 5th episode.
Johan is one of the scariest characters I have ever seen in any fictional media. His personality, backstory, all that is interesting but what really strikes me was that very fact: his ability to inspire fear in me so easily. Not through jump scares or sheer shock factor but mostly with his presence and dialogue. I am not even completely sure how the author managed to make it this way, but hey, it’s pretty cool.
That around sums up everything that I really want to say about this show. I didn’t think the plot was all that deep or interesting as some say and the characters aren’t that well written, but it had its fair share of positives. I, however, do sort of regret watching this one 74 episode anime when I could have 3-6 other anime that I could have maybe enjoyed more.

P.S: If there are any points on which you’d like to correct me or advise me, I’ll happily listen to them as I didn’t completely understand Monster myself and to be honest, there are a few moments here that I was just using fancy vocab for the purpose of the review without really understanding what I’m trying to even say.