Darker than Black

From the outside, it would appear this anime is perfect for me. Extremely laid back, peaceful guy is actually a super powerful psychic that can manipulate electricity and he has to fight a bunch of other “evil” psychic people with unique abilities. I like his character type and I like the premise.

When I watched it, I couldn’t help but be extremely bored. I think the biggest problem is that I have no idea what is the driving plot of this series. All I could gather was some thing called Hell’s Gate disappeared and all of a sudden people started gaining psychic powers. They throw around all these words and organizations, like Pandora, and I have no idea why they are there, whether they are good or bad, what their motivation is, etc. Like seriously, who the heck is the old lady/fortune teller at the police station?

In general, you get only very small glimpse’s of the main character’s past, with the last 2 episodes giving you a bit more detail. All you can assume is at some point his sister disappeared during the Hell’s Gate event. Nobody explains how he gained his powers and why they were there in the first place. Why is he listening to these orders to kill people when he’s actually a peaceful guy? I guess he’s trying to find out what happened to his sister? I didn’t know while watching, and I still don’t know.


Who are you and why do I care?

In general, the ending was anti-climactic and didn’t tie up the tons of loose ends left over. They killed one bad guy but he has an entire organization behind him, so that’s completely irrelevant. I guess since they have a Season 2, they need to drag the story on to fill up another 26 episodes.

I really wanted to like this anime, and a lot of the psychics have neat abilities and prices for using their abilities. Individual episode plots were alright, but the overall story just made no sense. I feel like I’m missing some background info or maybe I fell asleep during a critical dialogue portion. Actually, watching this anime reminded me of playing FF13. Everything is great about it, except it’s boring and I have no idea what’s going on or why I’m doing it.