Review of Durarara!!

Ikebukuro is one crazy ass town set in one crazy ass country that produced one crazy ass series of novels that now has a crazy ass anime adaptation, now replace "crazy ass" with "entertaining". STORY: Durarara (Or DRRR, which by the way sounds like an insult to someone when they make a stupid or obvious statement) can be described as two things: crazy and entertaining, and entertaining and crazy. Durarara is as crazy as it is entertaining, I mean what other anime has gang wars, superhuman people, super natural elements, and enough characters pushed up into like several clown cars, packed up like sardines, that startto break the hinges and screws start flying off... I can name one other but anyway, Durarara is the adaptation of light novels created by Ryohgo Narita, the creator of another crazy ass series named Baccano (Which there is only one other series I can compare that one too).

But seriously, I must applaud this novel writer, who now has two well loved series under his belt that both received great anime adaptations, that's right I'll say it right now, Durarara is a great anime, great as in entertaining, with an early competent story and a huge cast of wonderful and unique characters.
The story is about... mostly everyone! Just about all the characters receive a good bit of devoted screen time and get to narrate an episode, and you should be intimidated by what I mean by "everyone" as Durarara just has too many to write about in one review, so I'll just write about the most interesting ones, and the "main" characters, as the third half focuses entirely on those certain set of "main" characters.

The story isn't really straight forward but mostly character driven, the entire anime can be summed up into three parts: The first 1/3 is the slow start, building up the characters and establishing many elements of the series, the second 1/3 is pay off of the start up, fantastic and fun moments are all found here folks with a lot of the more interesting characters featured the most, and then finally the last 1/3, the umm, lamest part of the anime...

The first third of the anime is spend mostly introducing characters and establishing bits of story elements for the latter part of the anime with Mikado, the seemingly main character of Durarara and his friends Kida, his childhood friend, and Anri, a well endowed girl with a quite interesting back story. It's pretty slow to say the least, but it's all worth it later on.
The second third of the anime is the real meat of the entire anime, with the build up from earlier episodes, but the real reason is because the majority of the focus is on the more interesting characters like Celty, the headless Dullahan from Ireland who drives a black motorcycle around the city, Shizuo Heiwajima, the one guy in the dangerous city full of many dangerous people that you don't want to mess with, and other characters related to them in some fashion.

However, the last third of the anime is where I wouldn't mind to say there's no point on continuing further, unless you're a completest or have been enjoying the show to this point and want to continue. The story quickly shifts from being creative unique character driven story to a very lame teen drama involving gangs, with the focus being the most bland group of characters of the entire anime (Like Mikado and Kida), with the villain having the charisma of a random background character (And looks and starts out like one too).
I would consider calling this part of Durarara, DRRR, as it's sort of an insult to be stripped of all the greatest parts by the end of the anime, sure the other characters do have their moments (Like Shizuo tearing shit up), and bad moments too (Shizuo learns that he too be taken out by simple measures just like everyone else, and of course, the teen drama), but there is still worth while parts (A certain a**hole gets whats coming to him, and damn is it satisfying).

Though it's a shame Durarara mostly ends on a low note rather than a high one, but it blows it's load early on, and it might be a good idea to pretend it's only like 13 or 16 episodes like it's predecessor adaptation.

ANIMATION: Very unique and stylish, with character designs by Suzuhito Yasuda (The original artist for the novels and creator of manga series Yozakura Quartet). Apparently the original creator of Durarara wants consistency that even the studio that made Baccano, Brains Base, is also the one behind the production.
The animation is great, and the character designs are diverse enough to compliment their personalities and quirks (Of course a headless girl wouldn't need a detailed personality to stand out from the crowd), but most of them look rather generic, and the later part of the anime looks noticeably lower budget.

SOUND: With both a japanese and english voice over for Durarara available, I would recommend going your preference language to listen to since both languages are fine, however, I would give a more slight nod to the japanese voice over simply because the setting is Japan, and the english dub voice actors tend to be stumped by a japanese word when it would appear in dialogue, overall both have their stellar performances that only each language provides.
The theme music are great, especially the first opening, but as the later part of anime becomes blander, so does the theme music.
The background music is mostly loud jazz music, that seems out of place at times.

OVERALL:
The Good:
+ A unique and great character driven story.
+ Diverse cast of interesting characters.
+ Both japanese and english voice overs are equally great.

The Bad:
- The last third of the anime is disappointing, with too much focus on the bland characters.
- The technical side also suffers at the later end of the anime.

As an added bonus, Durarara also has many cameos of several different anime thrown about, so be sure to pay attention to the back grounds and what figures and manga you'll see.