Kingdom is one of my favorite mangas, having stumbled across it by chance after sinking my teeth into Vagabond some years ago. Finally digging into my ever-growing anime list, I randomly picked Kingdom's anime adaptation as my next viewing experience (thank you cool feature of AniList).

To be honest, for 2012, it looks really well: the animation, the artstyle, it's pretty good... when it's not using CGI. I'm not really sure who greenlit this, but the CGI here is horrendous and quite possibly the only tell this is a 2012 anime all things considered. While it gets better as the season goes on, there seems no be no rhyme or reason surrounding its usage. One moment it's a normal dialogue, next frame it's suddenly CGI. It does look decent enough for the wide shots and panoramic views of the battlefields, but whenever it goes for close-ups, it looks horrendous. This goes double for characters. Early episodes with CGI Shin show him with very jittery and ugly facial features, especially mouth movements, while the few one-on-one battles feel very clunky. By the end, Houken vs Ouki (one of the biggest highlights and pivotal moments in the story, even now), there's some reliance in CGI for some of its scenes, but it's used much more sparingly. Conversely, I noticed every scene Shoubunkun is in has him animated in CGI, which makes him feel weirdly 3D in the world - and to be honest, this disconnect between the regular 2D scenes having 3D-looking models is what makes the CGI look so bad.

Another bone I have to pick with it is the lack of any real violence and gore. If you've read the manga, you know most battles, if not all of them, have an overwhelming amount of bisecting, beheading and power-cleaving through soldiers. It's often how the manga tells you this character is strong, by how gruesome and effortless they can bisect a man. In here, blood is only shown on non-fatal cuts or stabs. Moubu and Houken's cleaves, for instance, just send their targets away with unfathomable strength, rather than the accustomed (and expected) experience of seeing soldiers getting physically cleaved in two. This makes some moments, like Moubu and Tou's spinning swings feel more over-the-top and silly than they ought to be. You can still get a sense of strength, but the lack of that visual, expected impact in a war anime really is disappointing.

When it comes to the material adapted, it skips the entirety of the Assasination Plot arc, which served to fuel the bigger battle of Sei's and Ryofui's faction past the starting throne usurper arc. Everything else is faithfully adapted, with the highlight naturally being Ouki himself and the battle of Bayou. The death of one of my favorite characters still has the same impact as it did back then when I didn't expect it, and to see it without CGI is honestly surprising, since the no-rules rule of its usage made me think they had restraint when it came to this scene, which is, once again, one of the pivotal moments in the manga.

Overall, it's solid, past the clunky and distracting usage of CGI on the first episodes. But once it gets going, it knows better when and when not to use it.