The Kingdoms of Ruin

I'm not one for writing reviews so you can imagine how awful this is. As someone whose watched anime religiously for nearly 30 years. This is one of the worst.

Took 7 episodes just to set the main protagonists into the true plot of the story. Which is always their journey.

The main character is annoyingly ignorant. Which is unbelievable, as hardship normally makes the character wise and more clever.

Then the girl is frustratingly playing a role that interferes with the main characters progress throughout.

Its actually given me a real headache.

From the beginning it set the tone to be a fantastic dark fantasy about revenge. It had the gore and fair quality of animation. The plot was set perfectly for a great anime.

The more you watch it, the more you will be left annoyed. As the fight scenes build up your excitement for something epic. Only for it to deviate far from your expectations in the worst way.

I'm not sure if this was out of the authors desire to make it unexpected and unconventional. However it achieved that in negative aspect.

My recommendation is spare yourselves the headache and waste of time.

Calling it a trash anime would be an understatement.

And that's not even my thoughts based on my preference. There are many anime that do not appeal to me that much that I can still say are good shows.

Calling this anime trash would be a kindness.

Seriously, don't waste your time and suffer this, unless you are a serious masochist.

This is some excellent "so bad, it's good" material. It is tough to take seriously since it is so incredibly edgy. It's funny because the (many) tragic scenes are absurdly extravagant. It seems like the show was written by a child who was taken straight out of an Xbox voice chat for Call of Duty.

There aren't many characters in this that you will like. The protagonist assaults others for incredibly trivial motives. The empire, our adversarial force, is committing genocide because, well, they're nasty. If someone watched this and all they took away was that it's edgy and all the subtlety is lost, then it sounds a lot like a certain megahit series with a wicked protagonist seeking retribution on the world for genocide. Kingdoms of Ruin is a great comedy even if it has rapidly established itself as absolutely awful television.

This started in a promising manner. You see some gruesome deaths and are led to believe this will be a gnarly tail of revenge that leaves you hanging on the edge of your seat.

Then they make no attempt to develop the characters in any way shape or form and the whole series dialogue could be summed up as;

"hey, i don't know who you are but I'm gonna revenge ya" "Ohh hey, you have nothing to do with my plot? Well, guess i better revenge you anyway" "innaniment object in my field of view? Ohh you better believe that's a revenging"

The characters end up with as many dimensions as a singular point in space (math joke) and are so poorly written it makes you wonder if the writer is just throwing his (or Her, or it, no need to cancel me) 12vie angst in our face and passing it off as art.

I know this wasn't really well received but I think it was actually a good anime.

The visuals were solid, the action was solid, good character designs, the villains are unique and interesting.

The problems most people seem to have is how it diverges from where it's starting point and the pacing ( even though they don't seem to recognize this fact)

Pacing is crazy fast for a 12 ep anime. For example a typical anime burns though 3 vols maybe 4 of source material if rushed. This burned though 6.5 volumes of source, that's more than 1 volume for less than 2 episodes...

As you can imagine the result is a speed run. Where many things get cut and unexplored. Plot twist feel random because they have little to no build.

I still think it did a decent job given the circumstances. Probably be better if they covered less material but it is what it is.

As for the deviation from the start again, I think if Adonis (uhh I hate that name) character got more time to get fleshed out people would hate it so much.

You do see it a little at the end character development but it takes the whole series and just barely in last 5 mins.

Overall I liked it, but it's pretty different from anything else I've seen.

It's not your typical hero, nor anti hero story, nor even villain story.

I feel like it's going towards a redemption story for our MC Adonis (yuck hate that name).

So I say give it a try, even the haters admit they watched it til the end. Remember The worst amines aren't the ones people hate but the ones people can't finish or don't remember.

The beginning is good, but not amazing. The more you get into the story, the worse it gets. For me 1 star is almost to much. I've seen some animes, I don't consider an expert, because I am not, but to have 10 episodes (so far) with almost 16-18 minutes per episode...this is straight up BS. For me, it means only one thing: "I am a writer, I have only a couple of ideas, let's see how much can I go with those episodes in order to increase my viewership, because I am lacking of more imagination." Fun fact, there are animes with 30min per episodes with Seasons, alright? And there are better at storytelling than most of the nowadays movies. Think about it.

To be fair, I don't know where the story wants to go. At this point its just a waste of time.