I felt the need to write this review due to how conflicted Baki left me feeling.It starts out grabbing your attention very well with strong character introductions followed by a slew of good-great fights that put forward the best the show has as well as character interactions that made you want to see more of these characters...but then it forgets about any of those aspects when it becomes a muddled and mediocre mess of unlikable and uninteresting characters, boring fights and a titular character that hardly has the presence you would think that would present. I found it quite sad how something that showed such potential could let it all go to waste so easily.

As I said it's not all bad, the show's first half shows what it really could have been if it kept up like it did all the way through, the character that best shows this off would likely be Dorian - a death row convict from the US. His character seems to have soaked up all the charm this series had to offer as the show was enjoyable anytime he was on screen, this was only further exemplified by how his past is revealed to us in pieces through himself and those around him in the fights he has which makes each one of them feel like they have some value. Now to get into the fights themselves which show the creativity and fun that the show can easily achieve when it really tries, with them always keeping you on edge and wondering what bizarre trick someone has up their sleeve next. This tends to make up for the weak and mostly stilted animation and jarring shift between ps2 era cgi and 2d visuals with just sheer entertainment value. He also showcases the character dynamics in the show at their best with how he plays off the characters in the Shin Shin Kai and the relationship he has with them.

The main problem comes with anything after he's out of the picture; with one part Baki himself to blame(which I'll go into in a bit), one part the general handling of other characters and one part the pathetic lot of the other death row convicts. All of the other death row inmates lacked the sense of unpredictability and danger that Dorian provided, making them never feel like an urgent threat that had to be dismissed and gave way rather for basically any character the show wanted to just curb stomp them, which hardly worked to the show's favor when most of these characters just seem to appear out of thin air (though that's one point I concede might just be due to them being better shown during the previous arcs) which could've still been interesting if the fights themselves showed the level of imagination and spectacle based flux in the nature of the fight that made the fights in the show fun to watch, but alas they tended to just be tediously long one sided affairs that lacked any of that.

The second half of the show really shows how weak Baki is as a character when it shifts the focus to him and immediately the show starts to suffer for it, he just comes off as a hollow unlikable husk of a person. The show never once provides a reason for you to get invested into him as the protagonist and hardly if ever helps you connect to him leaving you with hardly any attachment to the character making any moment which is supposed to make you feel something for him fall flat faster than the speed of light would allow. This problem is only exacerbated with the few ounces of development he does get; none of which feels earned or like an actual logical outcome, making it feel like it just did it in service of the plot rather than working in any meaningful way towards making him an actual character.

All of this is only further compounded with how most of the other characters are handled in the second half, with the show more insistent on constantly throwing new characters at you while hardly focusing on developing any of the existing ones, this creates a problem of ending up with a giant quantity of characters to juggle without any quality that makes these characters worth a damn. The show also feels like its constantly trying to build up to something either in each individual fight or arcs as a whole only to end up feeling like you've been hit with a wet blanket to the face once it's all over and you've gotten none of the promised payoff.

I honestly really wanted to like this show with how promising it seemed to be and how it evoked a familiarity due to its fights reminding me of the much superior JJBA Part 2, unfortunately it became a dwindling mess after not long but if not for anything else I might still recommend the Dorian set of episodes by themselves but the show as a whole is just not worth the time invested into it.