Koutetsujou no Kabaneri

koutetsujou-no-kabaneri

MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS – I wrote this back on 07.02.16 on Twitter so I don’t have the spoilers in red text.

Wow so I had high hopes for this anime. I quite enjoy almost any post apocalyptic story. It doesn’t just have to be anime. It can be a TV show, a movie, manga, or anime. So when I read the synopsis on this series I was very excited. Watching the first few episodes also had me excited and wondering what was next.

The idea of the world being taken over by something is not a new idea. It has been done many times in the past but this one was interesting to me. Not sure if it was explained in the show or not but if it was it must have not left much of an impact because I don’t know why people turn into the “Kabane” the big bad scary thing of this series. I just learned that if you get bitten by one then you turn into one. You have enough time to blow your own heart up to keep from becoming one of these things but that is as far as I know about the “bad guys”

The main male character finds a way to prevent the virus from turning him. He then goes on to fight the Kabane to protect his “village”. I quote the word village because they are on a train most of the show and trying to overcome the stigma of what he has become. Not human but not a Kabane.

So the series started off good. Getting information but somewhere it just stops and goes full on [just kill things, make blood show up, make the viewers feel bad for character X, have fights!] so it starts to get pretty bland. As I said I had high hopes for this series and sadly near the mid point of the show I became sad. To me it falls into the not enough backstory info about characters to make me care when someone dies. It felt as if the creators tried to kill someone and have people crying to make the viewer feel like they should be sad that that person is dead. Sorry didn’t work. When the MC friend gets killed the MC gets all upset and is crying. Am I upset that a MC is crying? A man doesn’t cry right? No and wrong. What I am upset about is the fact that his friend died and they have the MC cry as a ploy to make the viewer feel bad about his death. The only reason you feel bad later on about this death is because it hinders (for a short time) the MC ability to think right and make good decisions.

So our MC goes and fights a human that took his village people hostage. But he is doing this to save a girl who is also like him but didn’t get bitten but was created to be this half and half thing. To do this the MC takes “black blood” to make him stronger and fights this bad guy. You find out he is like them half and half. The MC saves the girl with “White Blood” and she kills the main bad guy.

So the MC takes something that will end his life to save a girl. Hes going to die right? This is an anime that doesn’t happen. If you have watched any anime you will know this doesn’t happen so why are we worried?

Then everyone meets up and ends up on the train and the MC wakes up and we learn he somehow got injected with “White Blood” too to save his life.

Alright so again this is an anime the MC we knew wasn’t going to die but it would have been nice for us to see the main bad guy giving the MC the white blood. It would have added a little more to the viewer to be conflicted when the girl kills him. But instead we see the girl that the MC saved kill the bad guy and we don’t find out till later that the bad guy gave the MC the “White Blood”…..

I felt this had a lot of wasted potential. This is one show I am left at the end not so much wanting more but feeling ripped off. So much more could have been done. If this was longer than 12 episodes I think this would have been a great show to watch.

I still liked it. The characters we did learn about I liked. The other characters with more development I could see myself liking them. I do suggest people to watch it. This could be a gateway into the manga or light novel. As I said many times now I just wish more would have been done.

The art style is nice nothing to go one way or the other on.

I give this a 7/10. The rushed story, the lack of background info on a lot of stuff, and the poor feeling I get at the end of the show is what pulls this down.