Review of Durarara!!
Durarara might be a good choice for you if you're looking for a story that has a more extroverted style to its writing and you don't mind a couple of conveniences being thrown along. Now what I mean by an extroverted style is simple. The story and its characters only develops through the means of the relation or conflict of other characters to other different characters. If there's any inner struggle or any inner monologue it's gonna be 99% of the time, actually, probably always, due to another person or the relationship the person in question has with them. You see the series pretty muchdefines every character with a simple label and then gives them more depth through the relationships and the new characters they will come across. While I'd say the style the show used was really interesting, there are some problems due to not thinking through about this style's possible weakpoints. For one, between every relationship, what's the easiest emotion to throw in? Love, of course.
And most characters LOVE someone. About 80% of the characters (the important ones or at the very least, seemingly important) do things for the sake of romance or with romance as their fuel. Love is not the only emotion that can define a relationship. And no, I don't mean hate. It's not just these two extremes that are the only things you can explore. But I will give it to you it's quite hard to do that when most characters don't have any thing that fuels them other than the people around them. Still, perhaps maybe the theme of love is a bit too much when you have a stalker, a sister who wants her brother, a woman with no head and so on... A little diversity wouldn't have hurt in the meaningful relationships of the characters.
The other weakness of this style is the characters have no sense of self. When the story focuses on a character, it describes the character had with the world of Durarara, defining who they are. Except it only defines who they are in the world, not who they are in a personal sense. Let me use Celty as an example, who is a Dullahan that's looking for her missing head, in order to not forget who she is. Basically this goal of hers defines the relationship they have and how they change once she moves towards this goal and why she is who she is. But everyone else you just simply don't have any material to use in order to understand why they feel the way they feel towards someone, you just accept that's that. I guess they've been through this and that, yeah sure, but take the social ties they've established and you have... some generic label and absolutely nothing else. The closest to Celty as far as execution comes is Shizuo and Izaya but they're not quite there for different reasons I can't give away due to spoilers. Anyone else? Not really.
They could've been far better characters if they had some sort of motivation of their own that wasn't strictly tied to the relationships they've had or are having with other people. While it's true every action other than our own is what defines us, the only reason that is even true is because it has an impact on us as a person. We develop skills, preferences, we don't just define ourselves with our preestablished relationships, we have some things, some interests, that define who we are and why we see things the way we do, which define us and give us a personality that makes us look for people alike us. Most, if not all characters, have no interests, no goals of their own, none whatsoever. Other than their relationships with other people, there's nothing to the characters. To put it bluntly, it's just like a game Izaya has created. It seemingly has no rules and is chaotic played on some board. The pieces are from chess, shogi, checkers and so on. You will see the pieces. You will see the board. You know in what directions the pieces can move due to which piece they are.
But you won't know the rules by which the pieces operate or why they are where they are on the board.
To sum up what I said, the relationships the characters have are well defined, but they themselves are definitely not. That is why I called the anime extroverted. It is an interesting execution which has a couple of things to improve upon.
Another thing I disliked is how some things just simply don't make sense. Like for instance, you have a guy which we operate on the assumption can use his body's full capacity whenever enraged. Am I supposed to believe that no government has taken any interest in that to study him or that he is not at least known and that absolutely has no problem with his vandalism? I mean seriously, when we get introduced to the series we will be first seeing him throwing a fucking Vending Machine 5 meters into the air. The police is almost never present, almost non-existent. I would complain about some other things too but, really, beyond this things get really spoilery. And you will be often confused by the series because it takes its time to tie things together. But it does tie things together, even if the story operates on monumental conveniences, and I did quite enjoy seeing the way series completed itself.
As far as the art and sound goes, they're pretty good. The OST is pretty fitting and sounds quite decent while the art style does the writing style justice through the way it highlights its characters. Keeping in mind that it's also quite simple and easy on the eyes, I enjoyed it.
If you're gonna watch Durarara, expect to be confused and things to feel convenient a whole lot. You most likely will enjoy the series' and how the characters tie themselves to the overarching world, not just amongst each other, but the town itself despite everything I said. But the series could've been written better. It still manages to be entertaining, but if you expect well expressed personal conflict that doesn't exist. You instead get a lot of social conflict that defines the place of the characters in their world. If you think that's a fair trade, or you find this interesting, give this series a try. If not, you could skip it.