Samurai Deeper Kyo

[Dracos]

Well, the directors of this anime had a very simple plan.

"How can we take a cool concept with an interesting lead character concept and random sexy girls around and make it suck as much as possible."

And you know, they did a damn good job.  Even the sexy looking female lead can't save the fact that this anime is a morass of sucky.  The anime is painfully slow paced, has tons and tons of needless filler, adds comedy in at places that are totally fucking inappropriate and just generally plays like shit.

The only good thing I can say about it is it has a really spiffy box.

Dracos

[thepanda]

"How can we take a cool concept with an interesting lead character concept and random sexy girls around and make it suck as much as possible?" <- The Anime

"How can we take a cool concept with an interesting lead character concept and random sexy girls around and make it ROCK as much as possible?" <- The Manga

[DB]

Here I'll disagree slightly. I didn't find the concept all that outstanding to begin with. It's not bad, but it doesn't goggle my eyes and make me go 'Oooo yeah!' either. Generally, concepts are a dime a dozen. It's how you execute them that makes it work. Here, they didn't bungle it, but they didn't do anything to set this above the rest either. I'd rate it around a middle ground.

As to the anime itself, I found it entertaining enough to be worth watching once. No new ground is broken here, as the plot is formulamatic. The actions sequences are fairly bland (and brief), though the artwork itself in the series was good to counterbalance it. But the way the story progressed was enough to keep my interest, though not to the degree where I had to watch the next episode or go into withdrawl. They didn't really make me intruiged by the 'mystery' behind Kyo, or the plot of the bad guys, but neither did they turn me off either, hence my contention of it being 'middle ground'.

Character interactions were what made this whole thing slightly above average (though the characters themselves were not deeply delved into, partially because the cast is so large). I liked most of the main characters, and how they interacted with one another. Some of the villain interactions were good as well, though the majority of the early ones were very bland and in the 'monster of the week' category.

Saying it 'sucks' is far too vicious. Samurai, Search for the Sword, sucks. Silent Service, sucks. Dog Soldier, sucks. 90% of the video games turned into anime, suck. SDK is average, maybe a touch above average due to fairly interesting characters.

I'll try looking over the manga at some point to see how different it is, as others are saying. I agree that frequently the manga is better than anime, but I've found the opposite true on more than one occasion. I'm curious to see if I think there's that much difference between the two.

My rating for the anime 6 out of 10.