Review of Durarara!!

I might be a little biased but damn did I love this series. I came across this entirely by chance-- someone was asking for recommendations for something similar to Baccano and aside from the abundant answers of boku no pico, someone recommended a series by the same person, Durarara!! They recommender went as far to say that it was even better than Bacanno if you can ignore the fujoshi shit. I don't think I ever saw Durarara!! come up again for a couple months after that so I guess it was lucky I'd seen it when I did. I tried to get into Baccano butit just wasn't something I was in the mood for at the time so I tried Durarara and easily fell into it.

The first episode did not particularly woo me as much as I had hoped but it was definitely not hard to get into. My immediate allure to the show was actually Izaya and his "love" of people. He loved the kinds of reactions people had to just about anything, and while I like to think I am not much of a sadist, I can appreciate the idea. People are interesting creatures. Though I'd read the synopsis, I hoped for a lot more of Izaya and I was not disappointed as he peppered the show, observing and manipulating others acting as an informant and often having street lights thrown at him by an enraged Shizuo, who I was also a fan of but not necessarily paired together. I loved Shizuo's softer moments with Celty.

I'll say this now, I absolutely loved the soundtrack. Both opening themes are a great listen all by themselves and I often find myself youtubing the ost for some nice background music. Some of it is so simple but pretty memorable as being unmistakeably from Durarara!!.

I'd also like to point out, I am utterly surprised as I had watched the subbed version first, but I was thoroughly impressed by Simon's Russian accent in the dub. Out of everyone I was most concerned about his voice and it just so happened he sounded exactly as I imagined. I can remember some dubs going as far as changing the nationalities of characters to warrant a different kind of accent (I swear it was One Piece but don't quote me...) but this was a delightful surprise!

Something I loved about the characters was it made everyone seem like they were important. If they were shown once, they were always brought up again in a later scenario in unexpected ways. I liked that side characters got a few times to be fleshed out, rather than being a typical filler character that is mentioned once and never again. They may not have been main characters or friends of the main characters but they were still given a role that would tie into another main character's storyline eventually and I have the hugest boner for that kind of shit.

The story is great and has a lot going on the entire time and I loved the shit out of it because almost all of it was wrapped up in the end. I know I loved it but the producers were not going to kid themselves-- they knew they weren't going to get more than 24 episodes. So instead of leaving open questions or cliffhangers at the end for a possible sequel, it was all wrapped up rather nicely for the most part I think. There's the color wars, the Dollars and their origin, Saika the demon blade, Celty the headless rider searching for her missing head, the human kidnapping, trafficking and experimentation in a secret lab facility, all hidden beneath a cute boys doing gay things facade. And I loved it.

Yes, they never wrapped up what on earth was going on with the human experimenting fully, and yes they never went into Izaya's past (and I'm sure a few others) but I felt that everything else was done spot on and honestly, it was enough for me. There was so much going on I hardly noticed. And isn't it fitting that as a man that is in the business of digging up dirt on high profile people that he himself have a low one? Just a thought.