Review of Descendants of Darkness

ANIMATION : The character designs are good, but what really stands out is the overall artistic style of the scenes. Some individual images presented in this show are downright captivating, such as the blindfolded and bloodied corpse of a kimono-clad woman found inside a box during the third arc. Describing it in words makes it sound gruesome, but the show was able to present the image in a rather beautiful way without sacrificing its macabre nature. SOUND : Overall, I found the voice acting and BGM to be quite decent. A bit overwrought at times but nothing that stood out as particularly bad. CHARACTERS : Much likethe story, the character angle in this show starts out on a good note.Fans of angsty, tormented, bishounen will likely eat this stuff up, but other anime fans are likely to be annoyed, or worse, bored by it.

OVERALL : In many ways, the test of a show of this nature is not whether it will win over its target audience but whether it is strong enough to entertain the average anime fan, and while the high quality animation makes a strong starting point for just that, the weak plots and fanservicey character development doomed its chances with me. Shounen-ai fans will likely be in heaven with the character designs, melodrama, and unrelenting innuendo, but I would only recommend this to other anime watchers if pretty visuals are more important to you than a cohesive story and if you like your character development REALLY melodramatic.