Anime Darker Than Black: Kuro no Keiyakusha

[Raiyuu]

Episode 24: LOL at [spoiler]rubber-band gun[/spoiler] Contractor, and WTF at [spoiler]little kid Amber[/spoiler].

Was the girl on the gantry [spoiler]Mai[/spoiler]? The beginning of the series was quite a while ago and her character design wasn't massively memorable to begin with, so I couldn't be sure. At first I thought it was [spoiler]Hei's sister[/spoiler], but the powers didn't match. If it was [spoiler]Mai[/spoiler], then her reappearance felt pretty glossed over and anticlimactic - as did a lot of the deaths in the episode. [spoiler]Mao running off, especially, felt a bit like the writers had no use for him in the climax and just needed to get rid of him before the endgame. shame, I liked Mao[/spoiler].

Finale: If nothing else, the music in the final episode was stunning, especially during [spoiler]Amber's explanation[/spoiler]. Also, I feel like a fool for not noticing earlier that [spoiler]Amber's remuneration was to get younger[/spoiler]. Overall it was a pretty satisfying, if not totally life-changing, end to a pretty satisfying, if not totally life-changing, series.

[Dagger]

I think my problem with DtB as a whole is that it tried to straddle the episodic-linear divide without a tremendous amount of success in either department.

Including shows made up of two- or three-episode story arcs, there have been at least a few amazing episodic anime in recent years (Mushishi, Mononoke), but these don't attempt to have any kind of broader story. Shinichiro Watanabe strikes the best balance, I think, although his shows lean much more toward episodic, anyway.

As much as I actually enjoyed watching DtB, a lot of the time I had the nagging sense that they'd come up with this great world but didn't have much of a plot to go with it. It couldn't have been a short OVA or a half-length TV series, because of the amount of exposition required just to flesh out the background, but the main story is kind of thin, as far as full-length series go.

~Dagger~