Summary

This review may contain spoilers.

The anime is about a man who wants to kill the psychopath whose life he saved and falls into a rabbit hole of secret organizations, social experiments and childhood traumas to find the man he is looking for and why that man does what he does.

The anime shows the viewer that pure evil may be right in front of you and you would not know it.

The characters are interesting and their design is realistic.

The animation is okay and effort is put in making their world look realistic.

The sound is okay.

Story

Like

There are episodes which introduce you to new characters, which end up proving a moral point related to the main characters their quest or do things which aid one of the main characters in their quest.

The ending leaves room for speculation, because it's not outright mentioned why Johan did what he did. Did Johan kill people because he felt unwanted by his mother? Did he kill because of Frans Bonaparta's experiments or due to the experiments which were done on him while in the Kinderheim orphanage? The twins their real names are also never revealed and we don't know what he does after running away from the hospital in the end. Will he do it all over again or will he leave is past behind and try to live a good life?

It is nice to see in the last episode what the main characters are doing now that everything is over. The same goes for the major side characters.

It is interesting that the story is set in Europe in the year 1986 and that historical events and old ideologies influenced the story. It's not often that you see a story which is influenced by communist secret police, neo-nazi in the city's underworld, people who once were part of those ideologies.

The side characters return throughout the anime at different times. A character might show up at episode 20 and show back up in episode 50. This happens for example with "the baby".

Dislike

There are many flashbacks, which makes it hard sometimes to know what happened in which order.

Characters

Like

Tenma keeps to his values and beliefs even after all that happened. The same goes for Nina, who also did not kill anyone despite comming very close to it at times.

Johan appears as a decent young, handsome, intelligent, well spoken, kind man, despite being a monster. If you were to meet him on the street, you would never imagine that he has killed so many people. He really is a wolf in sheep's clothing.

Dislike

None

Animation

Like

The art style looks old, but not it is not bad. The art style makes characters look more realistic, which is nice and fits the type of story.

I did not notice any CGI. There is even an episode where Tenma meets his old classmate who is a criminal psychologist and they talk at a bus stop where there are many people. While they are talking, the people in the background do not move. Zankyou no Terror had a similar situation where characters were talking in a park and there were CGI people moving in the background, which took attention away from the characters which were talking.

Dislike

None

Sound

Like

None

Dislike

None

Other

Like

None

Dislike

None