Way back when Tokyopop was a major manga publisher, I loved the Kindaichi Case Files series. Following the grandson of a famous fictional detective (like if we had a series about the grandson of Sherlock Holmes), the mysteries had the potential to be solved by the reader—making for a fun experience! There have been several different series released over the years; this particular series aired from 2014-2016 and is just as fun as the manga. Anilist lists the sequel series (The File of Young Kindaichi Returns 2) separately, but my review is for both—there’s no difference between the two. Both adapt stories from the manga, feature the same main characters, and offer episodes full of murder mysteries (and sometimes nonmurder, but mostly murder).

“The Files of Kindaichi Returns centers on Hajime Kindaichi, grandson of the famous detective Kosuke Kindaichi. Though he usually appears to be a regular high school student, when a difficult case arises Hajime, along with his childhood friend Miyuki Nanase, police inspector Isamu Kenmochi, and rival Kengo Akechi, use their sharp deduction skills to solve each mystery.”

Each episode starts with a handy list of characters, shown in a 2x8 grid. All victims and perpetrators will come from this list. It’s pretty fun to make guesses immediately based on how they look, and adjust those as a case proceeds.

There’s not a lot of blood, but people get killed off left and right, so don’t get attached to anyone who’s not a recurring character because there’s a good chance you’ll lose them. Despite there being multiple previous anime adaptations of this series, you don’t need to know anything about the series or characters from those previous series; anyone important will be given at least a basic introduction that’s sufficient to understand why they’re notable in an episode.

While there are definitely fictional liberties taken, they’re standard for a murder mystery series. By which I mean, somehow, no one has noticed that murders follow Kindaichi like hipsters follow food trucks. It should be noted that Kindaichi has that ~fantastic~ character quality of being a pervert and joker, so when he’s not solving mysteries he spends a good amount of time ogling women, trying to peep, etc. Might be sadly familiar to those with a good amount of anime-watching under their belts, but it doesn’t stop being annoying.

Verdict

English dub? Sadly, no.

Visuals: Fine and shiny. Considering the characters were designed in the early 90s (though the series takes place modern-day), hairstyles occasionally made me giggle.

Worth watching? Do you like mysteries? Then heck yes. Recurring characters like the police inspectors aren’t bumbling–one, Akechi, is Kindaichi’s intellectual equal, which is a nice change of pace. Kindaichi himself is pretty lazy (hello, relatability) and needs direction from friend (and Watson to his Sherlock) Miyuki, until someone gets murdered or kidnapped. The solutions are almost always implausibly complicated (and therefore fun), but there were only a couple times in the entire 47-episode series that the characters missed obvious-to-the-viewer things.