Review of Black Rock Shooter

This is my first review so please forgive me if i fuck up a bit. But since i just finished watching Black Rock Shooter and i wanted to say some things from my mind, here i am. First let me get the technical aspects out of the way: This show looks and sounds phenomenal. Even though you might not realize it at first glance a lot of the scenes in the other world are full of CGI. Usually i dont like CGI (Arslan Senki) but it works so well in this one. You barely notice the transition between CGI and handdrawn animation and it makes forsome spectacular camera swings. From this day on, when i see CGI i will compare it to Black Rock Shooter. The Art is beautiful aswell with vibrant colours and a different theme for every character. The music fits perfectly in every situation and makes the already great fights even better. I dont like the opening to much but thats always skippable.

Now I'll talk about the story and characters:

Since you cant divide the story from the characters in Black Rock Shooter i wont take a look at them seperatly. I'd devide the story into two arcs which i'll call Kagari Arc and Yuu Arc. I think most people who watched the show will understand.

Kagari Arc:
It starts of really promising with clearly defined personalities of different characters. There are Mato and Yuu who are both lighthearted friends and dont worry about to much. Yomi seems to be an outsider who cant have friends since her psychotic friend Kagari wants to have her for herself. But Yomi wants to be friends with Mato so they meet and Kagari bullies the shit out of Mato. From here on the characters have to deal with this problem. This beginning was phenomenal since you could see every characters motivation witness how they tried to deal with awful situation in realistic ways. While the main characters deal with emotional problems, they have alter egos in another world fighting the same battles on a physical level. You try to unravel what this world is for yourself. Through the course of this arc nearly all characters develop awesomely and come to a satisfying end.
The Kagari Arc is some of the best Anime I have ever seen. It has believable characters with relatable motivations and awesome action scenes, even though i prefered the dialogue sequences in the real world. I think everybody can enjoy the first 3-4 episodes of this series. If the series would have continued like this I'd likely given it 10/10.

Yuu Arc:
The rest of the series I cant recommend as well as the first half. I might go as far as calling it a mess. The characters randomly change their personality which is partially due to the plot but feels totally random in other cases (Saya). Unfortunately this leads to the characters not being relatable at all. Also two of the most interesting characters from the first half have nearly no role in the second Arc. There is also a character which dissappears from all peoples memories for no reason. It is here where the other world is explained and the characters can interact with it on their own will. Most of this part of the story is now focussed on this world. The action again is beautiful and has more of a reason in this Arc.
Because of the random character changes, the predictable and boring ending and the focus on the less interesting characters I cannot in good mind recomend this to a lot of people. Even though the fight scenes are still spectacular the character interactions unfortunately got less in numbers and less interesting. If I would rate this part alone it would probably be a 4/10

Those are my thoughts on Black Rock Shooter. I might just be to stupid to get the second half but I think I laid my arguments out well. In the end I was disappointed by Black Rock Shooter since it had such an amazing start, but got really messy in the end. I really wanted this to be a 10/10 show.