Review of Black Lagoon

I actually stumbled onto this show by accident, I forgot the name of what I wanted but remembered "black" was in the title somewhere. Definitely one of my better mistakes, because this show blew me out of the water. It's an easy enough story to get your head around. A business man gets mixed up with international pirates, and decides to join them because his life is awful. These are your modern day type pirates, with torpedoes instead of parrots. Some episodes are stand alone, others flow into small arcs, but each time there is a mission that the Lagoon Company have to complete - thinkgun running, smuggling people... That kind of stuff. All the motivation feels quite accessible, who doesn't need to make money to eat? Backstories are explored but not shoved down your throat. Everything feels very balanced and well polished.

The character design in this show is cranked up waaay high, and the animation couldn't possibly fit better. It's very unique, there's no silly "anime stretch arm" or mystery tentacle because the budget craps out. The action scenes have more empty bullet casings than Robocop, and even the slower scenes keep you interested by sheer strength of the characters. Visually, this is a feast.

It's a shame the soundtrack is so small, but luckily what few tracks exist are all fairly good. You've got action scenes, tense music, the usual round up. Some of these tracks pull a heavy rotation, which gets a little tiring, but it's not grating.
The voice acting on the otherhand is phenomenal. The English dialogue adaptation is some of the best I've ever heard, up there with Steins;Gate for believability. You can tell a lot of work went into recording, and it shines through so well.

The characters. Oh man, I could write a small essay on this! Each crew member is so distinguishable from the others, their own personalities are well laid out and their motivations are explained and advanced with the story. You're going to want to know more about the interesting characters because they're well designed, balanced, flawed, and very human. Even the escalation is at a reasonable level, the jobs get bigger and more difficult but the pay goes up. One of my favourite strong female leads ever is in this show, she'll probably be one of yours too by the time you're finished.

Seeing as I stumbled into this show by accident, I expected nothing at the start. Black Lagoon gave me so much back in return. Each mission is different and challenging in it's own way, the conflict between crewmates and enemies alike is gripping and fun to watch, and the way they really grill the new guy is painfully relatable (Thanks work). This is up there as one of my favourite shows, even if they break it into two 12 episode chunks for some reason. If you haven't seen this, stumble into the first episode and give it a chance, you won't regret a second of it.