Review of K

K was an anime that I honestly expected to like, but I was severely let down. In my opinion, it had great potential, but the story and characters weren't well-developed and were simply disappointing. I'm going to start with the things I liked about the show. First of all, I loved the art style and the scenery, the character design was also very much to my liking. The music was excellent and it perfectly fit the scenes. I have seen many people praise the artwork and music, but I do have a complaint regarding the artwork - the characters' faces lacked expressions. There were many sceneswhere the characters, instead of looking shocked, just looked a bit surprised. I do think they could've worked on the expressions more, but other than that, I have no complaints.
Moving on to things I didn't like. First and foremost - the very first episode. We are introduced to way too many characters at once and are given no time to connect with any of them. The story isn't even properly explained until the third episode. I think that this could've all been fixed if the show had around 25 episodes instead of only 13. That way, we would've had enough time to get to know the characters and the story would've been explained a lot better. Another big problem is that the characters have barely any personality, which makes it very difficult to connect with them and care about them. The main character is just your stereotypical protagonist: nice, funny and outgoing. He doesn't even get enough screentime with all these other characters around, so that's pretty much all we know about his personality. This brings me back to the problem I mentioned earlier - Too. Many. Characters. You can't have 15-20 important characters in a 13 episode anime. Having a lot of side characters is okay, but having so many characters that serve a purpose in the plot is quite overwhelming. Again, this would've been fixed if the anime was longer. The story was an interesting idea, but poorly executed. We don't even get introduced to all the kings during the first season, which I found very disappointing. The plot twists would've been much more shocking if - you guessed it - the show had more episodes.
Overall, I expected more from this anime and I'm sad that it couldn't have been longer and better developed, because it truly had great potential and could've become one of my favorite anime series.