Review of Shiki

Shiki is a hit or miss show with some deep moments and some creepy moments that are excellent and some other moments where the characters are so unrealistically stupid or something wildly unlikely is happening for the convenience of the plot that you can't help but laugh and/or facepalm. Art- The art in Shiki is unspectacular and overall very average. Production values aren't through the roof here and it's not super flashy but there isn't anything wrong with it either. Run of the mill anime stuff here, though it looks a bit older than it actually is. Sound- Quality voice acting for the most part, especially from the leads,though a couple of the supporting characters have very generic, perhaps slightly uninspired voices.

The soundtrack is very good and I have several tracks from it on my personal playlist, but it is undeniable that many of the songs sound quite similar and with time and repetition that begins to wear on the viewer. A few of the tracks that were once quite creepy become less creepy when you hear them for the eighth time. The music that does exist is quite good, but a bit more variety would have gone a long way.

Character-

The story and characters are probably the weakest point of Shiki. What the story is trying to do is awesome. It has deep, dark subject matter and the overall message it's trying to hammer home in the end is really intriguing to me and a premise I'm glad they explored. However, the execution is laughably bad. Over and over again characters are just braindead levels of stupid and naive and they'll all do a lot of highly unlikely, improbable, unrealistic things because the plot needs them to. If the characters had any common sense whatsoever the plot simply would not work. There are definitely several holes where if you stop and think for all of ten seconds you can find some pretty big problems. Excellent effort, really cool premise but a swing and a miss with how it was executed.

Enjoyment-

Watching Shiki felt like a guilty pleasure for me. I really, truly liked it for the most part and I often felt like I shouldn't because the plot had so many problems, but for whatever reason I liked the core concept of it all so much that I kept watching anyway. This show is objectively worse than the amount of which I enjoyed it, but there's no accounting for personal taste. The ending, likewise, falls very hard into the guilty pleasure category. I don't know how much sense it made (hint- not much), but I really enjoyed it anyway.

Overall-

If you can get into the concept or the deeper message the show is trying to convey enough to ignore a very, very flawed plot perhaps you'll enjoy this. I did, but I know in my heart of hearts it's a mediocre show.

+Awesome premise and bigger picture message
+A few genuinely creepy moments
+Standout soundtrack

-Plethora of plot holes and logic holes that you cannot think too much about and still enjoy the show
-The soundtrack gets reused too much and the repetition becomes noticeable in a bad way
-Almost all the characters are really, really dumb

OBJECTIVE RATING- Weak 6
PERSONAL ENJOYMENT RATING- Strong 7