Please note that this review represents my personal opinion only. I acknowledge that this is more of an angry rant than a coherent review but this is what I wanted to write.

Denji as a character is immediately thrust into a bad situation before you can gain any attachment. The entirety of episode 1 only exists to try and convince you that Denji is somebody worth paying attention to, but it has the opposite effect. There’s nothing eye-catching to be seen anywhere, and this is made worse by the mind-numbing colour palette, which is basically all greyscale. The last scene of the first episode is just this meaningless zombie slaughter mess, which is also animated with a lot of horrible CGI. Even in the first scenes, which are animated normally, there’s something really odd about the way the mouths move that I can’t quite put my finger on - but it adds an uncomfortable vibe to the whole thing. In the first episode, there’s also a conveniently inserted flashback scene of Denji and Pochita. This is the first of many, many blatant attempts to emotionally win over the viewers without actually doing anything with the story - it's almost arrogant, the way it simply expects you to get invested in it for no reason other than Denji being poor and losing Pochita. For something that is supposed to be bleak and dystopian, it feels very normal.

Makima appears to be an emotionless robot right from her introduction, which only serves to further alienate you. Her conversation with Denji at the udon place was very easily the cringiest, most horrible anime scene I’ve ever seen (I wrote this before finishing the show, this is no longer true). The whole thing with Denji being her dog could be mildly funny if it wasn’t put in such a serious way. It’s genuinely off-putting, especially because Denji is so stupid that he doesn’t understand the connotation. Personally speaking, a really dumb guy with the mental age of 12 is just incredibly annoying to watch as a main character, literally anything else would be better. Denji is the worst out of them, but to be honest, all of the characters are garbage. I think the main problem is the frustrating lack of purpose - maybe if the characters had any kind of tangible motivation other than killing devils they would be more interesting. But Aki, Power and Makima don’t actively hold back the show just by being boring - the glaring flaw in the cast is, of course, Denji. Denji does have a motive of sorts, his own curious horniness, which has nothing to do at all with anything else in the show, it's completely pointless to include. Denji, to me, honestly would feel much more at home being a gag side character in an ecchi maybe? There’s a huge genre mismatch going on here, and it’s not good. Denji, with his childish horny curiosity and comical stupidity clashes very badly with the dark, bleak setting. This might not seem like a big problem but it really is - because it raises the question: if the main character, the focal point of the anime, doesn’t care at all about what’s going on, then why should I? It certainly doesn’t inspire any idea that you should care about the characters - such an intrinsic story-telling device such as making the characters sympathetic to the audience is tossed aside in favour of making Chainsaw Man feel more unique.

I have just mentioned that Power is a boring character - however this does not hold true throughout the show. She combines Denji’s juvenile attitude and unbelievable stupidity with her own trait of animalistic selfishness to produce something truly repulsive. Her presence in any scene consistently makes it even more of a drag to watch; the more she screeches, the more painful it gets. Power is the character who doesn’t fit anywhere - on multiple occasions you can see her openly, shamelessly laughing and taking joy in others’ pain and suffering. This makes the main “team” of Chainsaw Man feel more like an empty shell than a group of people. Of course Power is not the only problem, just the biggest one - there is not a single distinct personality out of anyone there that is remotely interesting or adds to the vibe whatsoever. Fujimoto is simply trying to recycle old shounen tropes for his own use, and while the “group of good guys who team up to kill the bad guys” trope can work very well, here it’s openly forced for no benefit. It doesn’t work when the characters are either so paper-thin you can’t relate to them or, like Power, have a personality that fundamentally disagrees with connecting to others. And in anime like this, I believe the idea is that you care about the characters enough so that when they die, it should affect the audience somewhat. That is normally the goal when writing any character death into a story. The problem in Chainsaw Man is that deaths are brushed aside as insignificant, and to me it's ridiculous that even the other characters from the same team clearly don’t give a shit what happens to anyone else. Over the course of the show, in this way and more, Chainsaw Man miserably fails to build tension, which results in every dramatic scene feeling anticlimactic and underwhelming.

One part which was supposed to be very dramatic and failed spectacularly was the hotel scene, eps 6-7. After quickly being introduced to Himeno and Kobeni, they find themselves stuck in a building they can’t leave. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this setup - but as always, the execution is butchered. The scene is never really made scary by anything - sure, they’re stuck with no way of getting out but because you can’t sympathise with the characters normally, suddenly making it a dangerous situation changes nothing. Because the scene never feels scary, seeing Kobeni freaking out with the knife seems like the stupidest thing in the world, because the way the scene is framed makes her reactions so hard to understand. Most of this part is either Kobeni overreacting and Aki pacing around not knowing what to do, with some neatly inserted scenes of Power being a dick to everyone, which only makes this feel like even less of an emergency. The scene is finally ended when Denji gets out his chainsaws and kills the devil who trapped them there, in possibly the laziest fight scene I’ve ever seen, where he just stands in one place until the devil slowly dies.

Now it’s time to mention my least favourite scene in any piece of fiction, which takes place in episode 7. People who’ve been following the anime will probably already know what I’m talking about, it’s just so fucking disgusting that I don’t want to go into detail. But yes, the scene with Denji and Himeno in the bar. What reason could you possibly have for writing that in? Even in something that’s trying to take pride in being random and edgy, it’s far too far. So Himeno assaults Denji, Denji is traumatised, and everyone else laughs at him. You know, just team-building stuff. Easily the most unbearable, most revolting thing I have ever sat through, not even just the event itself but the icky “fake team” vibes make it exponentially worse. This scene then has a little continuation, showing Denji more than happy to be assaulted again, because he has the intellect of a small child. It’s so genuinely uncomfortable, it feels like I’m watching grooming. The way these bedroom scenes are shot adds to it even more, the POV camera angles are especially vomit-inducing. The worst part is that if you removed these scenes from the show, the story wouldn’t change! It didn’t add anything at all. Call me a pussy all you want, but I think I have good reason to find this part completely unbearable.

At around this point, Aki and Himeno both get their silly little “feel sorry for me!” flashback scenes, which are just so blatantly and conveniently inserted that it’s insulting. But actually, now that I think about it, seeing Aki’s house get blown away might be the only time I actually laughed in the whole anime - it was shot in such an amusing way, because the scene is cut so short it can only show a little segment of him playing and then woosh the house is gone, with great comedic timing. Emotionally, it does nothing though. But the failure to make anyone care about the characters pays a price - because Himeno is very quickly killed off, and, shocker, nobody else on the team cares at all! The only one who cares is Aki, who is still portrayed as an emotionless robot, so it never mattered anyway. Other than that one scene of him crying later on - which was ruined yet again by Power and Denji, clearly sitting there without a care in the world for either Himeno or Aki. Power and Denji are such a huge problem that affects the show because they’re both deliberately very childish and very stupid, which just means their mental capacities are so small it’s basically impossible to put themselves in other people’s shoes. Essentially, they’re stuck so far up their own asses that they can’t see anything happening around them. This means that no story event can actually affect them unless it happens directly to them, and this has a sloppy, uncaring feel to it that heavily detracts from any quality the show might’ve had.

Another part I found heavily uncomfortable was the many Makima/Denji scenes from the first half - I touched on the first one earlier, but they are all very similar. I despise the ASMR whispering, the heavy breathing and the way Denji openly worships her, it produces some agonising scenes. If the goal of these scenes is to make you feel deeply unsettled, then they do their job perfectly. It’s unfortunate that Makima actually seems to be a character with more than one dimension to her. The grave issue at hand is that the initial setup for the show was executed so fucking terribly that it’s really hard to care about anything that happens afterwards. But she is horrific to watch at the very start, and unfortunately, that is the most memorable thing about her. Another issue with these scenes, and most of the anime in general, is the depressing, empty feeling the scenes with no music have. Even in the fight scenes, the only thing you hear is this weird grindy repetitive soundtrack. Because they spent all the budget getting big artists to make 12 EDs, the actual anime lacks any attention pertaining to the sound that would help it feel less lifeless.

The entire premise with the devils and the hunters is set up in a way which makes it incredibly easy to just make up and randomly add in good guys and bad guys, but that means that nobody gets any kind of setup that would make them interesting. It’s just extremely lazy and shallow writing overall. The rushed and unimaginative creation of the setting makes it feel utterly devoid of life.

The ball-kicking scene in the final episode was another one of the absolute worst things they could have included. It feels genuinely insulting that this is portrayed as a scene of revenge or of satisfaction, essentially all it does is bring Aki right down to Denji’s level in terms of maturity and removes the last character who had potential to not be completely unbearable. This episode, and the build-up to it, was just plain boring, almost nothing at all happens in this part worth commenting on, it’s all just crap mindless action scenes and the occasional character development failure.

Anything that happens in Chainsaw Man that I haven’t mentioned so far is one of two things. Either: so bland and uninteresting I’ve completely forgotten about it (very likely) or: a fight scene. The fight scenes existed, I guess. They just weren’t interesting - it feels like they were leaning on the gore aspect far too much, and that they would much rather make a scene more gory than improve the choreography, or the animation quality. And, just speaking personally, it really didn’t do it for me. This makes it incredibly repetitive over the course of the show, as none of the individual action scenes have anything to offer past the very surface level. Obviously, a battle scene of any kind can be made really good even when repetitive if there’s high tension, or it has some kind of emotional impact, or at the very least you can feel some passion from the combatants. Chainsaw Man doesn’t even attempt this approach, sadly. It simply relies on its janky CGI chainsaws and spurting blood to carry it all the way. Almost all of the second half consists of this kind of scene, which is why I haven’t really mentioned any specifics after episode 8 or so. They’re just showing you gorefest after meaningless gorefest, in the hope there’s some shock value to be had there (there isn’t).

Chainsaw Man as a whole, rather than being made to craft a story, is simply made as a way to cram in as much edginess as possible, without any of the substance that it should come with. Pretentious and flimsy, it tries so hard to be unconventional that it loses all the properties that would even qualify it as a basic story. In my opinion, it is vapid and dull to the very extreme. Chainsaw Man quickly becomes quite painful to watch because it’s really difficult to ignore - while not engaging, its cringy dialogue and jarring visuals make it noticeably unpleasant. Hey, if you like gore, and meaningless edge for the sake of it - then this might be the show for you. It certainly wasn’t for me. Thanks for reading my review.