Review of Durarara!!

No Spoilers :) Durarara (and its successive seasons) is an interesting anime that I found after watching Baccano. Both made by Brain Base, I am starting to really dig their work. Instead of having fantastic animation, art, or soundtracks, it really offers something that the entire anime scene lacks, CHARACTER(s). Like Baccano, Durarara is all about the cast. You love them, you hate them, you ride the roller coaster with them. There isn't really anything "epic" about the story, and as a matter of fact there really isn't anything extraordinary that makes the story good. Not only that, you do have to dedicate time to this series(just like many narrative driven stories, think monogatari). If you put it down for more than a day or two you will forget what happened because of how many things are happening in parallel.

Think of Durarara (and show's like it) like animated books. They have a narrator, and tons of plot lines that converge and diverge through out the time frame. Because it follows such a large and diverse cast, with every secondary or side character being just as important as the main cast, it does take time to build into what is happening in the show. And this is what makes it a nice slow burn.

Over the course of the first season you really start to understand the city the story is placed in and the life that is just oozing through the alleyways. It has a vibe, a story. This is not something many shows try to achieve, usually choosing to focus on a small cast and a setting too large to get intimately familiar with. But Durarara does a fantastic job of really capturing the life of the entire city, and in consecutive seasons, the neighboring cities.

The show shows you parallels events and then combines them in the end to one final conclusion to walk away with, and keeps you guessing motives and events through out. It isn't a mystery show, but yet it does it better than the majority of them.

I have tried to walk around the spoilers as much as I can, but I will summarize the plot with one sentence: Durarara is about the life and people of ikebukuro, with all of its myths, legends, oddities, included.