Hell’s Paradise

This review contains spoilers. Proceed at your own discretion.

Hell’s Paradise was fun. I think the negatives are pretty obvious: The show looks rough, and is also rough on delivery on some things it wants to tell, such as how differently Sagiri is treated because she’s a woman. The pacing is also not the best all the time and struggles to balance characterization, action sequences and lore dumps. And I think I don’t need to talk much about the production issues behind the scenes because they’re glaringly obvious, with drawings being constantly off-model, which creates together with an already dull aesthetic not an impressive visual look. However, Hell’s Paradise was still fun. I like the power system and some ideas such as balancing the extremes and finding the right middle. I like how it plays a lot with life and death (by also literally having some characters die, but it also plays into the power system and the idea of immortality).

The characters also grew on me. Gabimaru and Sagiri are a solid pair of main characters, boasting both pretty nice character progression arcs caused by the other, while also being likable with their personality and backstory which makes it easy to sympathize and root for them. I especially like Gabimaru’s character arc of realizing being “soft” is not weak at all, but I also liked how Sagiri learns to confront death and the act of killing and gains a personal motivation apart from just following orders. The series also devotes a good amount of time on the side cast, and it mostly succeeds at doing so, even if the character is only explored to be killed off soon. With Tenza and Senta there are two deaths which were highly focused on and both of them worked well for me and managed to give the series more emotional gravitas. And yes, a lot of times this series is very on-the-nose with its storytelling but it's not that bad that it ruins the experience for me, it still works overall.

The story as a whole feels more streamlined and more focused on the themes, the characters, and the story, instead of just the fights and creating adrenaline by making protagonists and antagonists stronger and stronger, so story-wise it’s also much more interesting. I’m definitely interested to see how it will continue. And even with the production-issues, the direction in this season is good. The fights and emotional moments were well-executed, proper staging and the soundtrack were able to create intensity and immersion despite the lack of animation and drawing quality. It probably wasn’t able to please manga readers despite that though, because it probably didn’t manage to exceed its source material but as an anime-only I had a good time. I do hope that the 2nd season will have a better schedule though, because this is not sustainable by any means, of course.