Review of Durarara!!

Before going into Durarara, i honestly didn't know what to expect, other than it was directed by Takahiro Omori (Bacanno, Hell Girl, Haibane Renmei), and that it had a plot that made next to no sense. I can know say that I was glad I gave it a chance. The story of Durarara takes place in the Ikebukuro district of Tokyo and deals with the topics of gang wars, supernatural occurrences and...friendship... It focuses on a giant cast of well written characters, who are all connected to each other in some way or another, your cast of characters includes everything from a bad-ass motorcycleriding chick, to a black Russian man who speaks broken Japanese and sells very questionable sushi, to a homicidal manic. Personally, I believe that the characters is what makes this series so good, because there is a huge range of diversity among them, and the way they interact is great to watch. Take for example Shizuo and Izaya, on one hand you have Izaya, who is a relatively cool character that always seems to be calm, and is always working on the outside, manipulating everyone. Then on the other side of the spectrum you have Shizuo, who is the equivalent of the Hulk, and seems to solves all of his problem by beating them to a bloody pulp. The way these 2 characters interact is just hilarious to watch. Despite how well the characters are written, that would be my biggest complaint about the show. Because it has such a great cast, it only has so much time to focus and develop all of them properly, this is where the story starts to lose points. The story decides to forget about its amazing cast, and instead focuses on the three most boring characters in the show. Although this did not seriously affect my overall enjoyment of the show, I believe that the show's overall pacing would have been better if they took the time to properly explain the origins of all their characters (since it felt rushed at the end). Despite this I still found the show's climax to be quite eventful, and the ending to be somewhat satisfying. The animation for Durarara was done by Brains base, unfortunately I haven't watch anything else from them, so I can't comment on the art, but I can say that the action scenes where very well animated and where great to watch, and the show as a whole, was smoothly animated, despite having some problems with the budget (that are pretty obvious in the series). The sound tract for the anime sounds great, with two really addictive opening themes and two good ending themes. The music during the show really complements its setting by expressing the urban environment, in which the anime takes place. There is also classical sounding pieces used during the narration moments inside a character's head, which gives a nice contrast to the hectic chaos that happens in the series. In conclusion, I really enjoyed this anime, even though there were slight problems with the pacing in the latter half of the series, and the fact that not all the characters were properly developed/explained, it did not lower my overall enjoyment of the series, my only regret was waiting this long to watch it.