Review of Dorohedoro

An interesting watch, fantastic and unique world crippled by a small budget, mediocre to bad CG, questionable character design, an uninteresting protagonist and pointless filler that starts halfway and seems to only exist to end the season inconclusively. I did make we want to wait for the next season, or go read the manga, which is more than most modern anime do. Mixed bag would be the way to describe the anime: I know we've moved past making fun of bad CG but when your main character has a bad CG lizard head, it must be mentioned. This is not helped in theearly episodes by CG animation that seems to be missing quite a few movement frames, though that seems to improve over time (except Kaiman's head). On the other hand the animation for the martial art moves is quite impressive, in the few instances we get to see it and the art direction is fantastic with the world looking both interesting and gritty in ways we rarely get to see these days.

Meanwhile said main character is a bad, bland annoying Shōnen trope on legs. Yes it is justified, but that doesn't mean it's interesting or fun to watch. Luckily the author, or at least the anime knows this and lets us spend a decent enough time with all of the far far more interesting character.

Said characters suffer from a design that is also mix bag, overall it's great with a lot of personality and uniqueness, to the point that even Kaiman looks good with his mask on, but the faces are god awful, little more than eggs with different colored circles in them, which is even more egregious when you compare them to the manga look.

The plot it self is generic but as a tool designed to get interesting characters interacting with each other it gets the job done, when it doesn't get sidetracked into pointless filler situations that prologue the season just enough that we don't get any conclusion at the end of the it despite most likely the watcher having figured the mystery already. Did we really need a baseball match? Or an extended autobiographical video of a characters backstory?

Watch it for the world building and the uniqueness or maybe go for the manga, I'll probably do that to.