Akame ga Kill!

[imported from the review I did 3 years ago on MAL]

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

I'm not a professionnal anime reviewer and this is my 1st review so please keep that in mind while reading.

Akame ga Kill ! takes place in a medieval-like fantasy world, where corruption and power abuses rule. The emperor is being manipulated by the prime minister, a man who does not hesitate to kill everyone that could represent an obstacle for him. This anime gives a decent account of your typical "rebels vs. corrupted" kind of plot. The story in itself is not the most original you could find, but it remains coherent.

On to the art now : I've got nothing special to say about the quality of animation, as I find it neither especially god nor awfully bad. The combat scenes are not wonderful and there are not that much detailed backgrounds, but it remains decent : White fox studios have choosen not to take risks on the animation style which results in what I could qualify of a "usual good animation".
Talking about art, the sound of an anime is very important to me, and here, apart from a few very nice tracks - I personally like the openings and endings, however they did not hype me as much a some other OP/ED did -, the OST did not really move me.

In my opinon, THE real problem of Akame ga Kill ! is about the characters. There are of course some character development, but not enough for me. Most of the members of the Night Raid are given a 2-minutes flashback about their past, but that's pretty much it. We can learn a bit more from the story of Tatsumi and Akame, but here again it's not sufficient : both of them would have deserved a bit more flashbacks or anything else that could benefit their character's deepness. The real problem is not here tough. This anime's characters have a very short life expectancy, similar to a Game of Thrones / Attack on Titan character, that is to say : you KNOW - or at least you understand it fairly early in the series - that many deaths are to be expected -, which is in itself fine : it's a choice. However, there is a big problem concerning litterally ALL the deaths in this series : they are not given enough time to be touching. In fact, as the reviewer "MrPretentious" pointed out, it seems that we are seeing the "the death of some stranger in a car accident" : the little character development, but also and especially the music and the length of the death - often less than a minute - results in that kind of feeling. That stranger that was just killed, you can feel pity towards him, but what we should feel is, in my opinion, sadness. I'm talking about the music because the death passes rapidly, so the music does not have any possibility of growing emotional, like in a cescendo, or at least it did not move me as much as I expected. Just compare it to a certain character's death in Hai to Gensou no Grimgar (won't tell his name but you obviously know who I'm thinking about if you've seen the show). The death of this character keeps floating in the air of many episodes and it feels more "important", more touching. He was part of the main character and you feel sad when he dies. This is more what I expected of a show such as Akame ga Kill where many deaths occur, especially when considering it's a 24-long series, compared to the 12-eps long Hai to Gensou no Grimgar...

[Big spoilers ahead]
In conclusion of all those problems, when I arrived at episode 24, I was just left with all the characters that are basically dead, and Akame, smiling - not even bothered - living her assassin life as if nothing happened... So yeah, I was just left here, with the feeling that the dead were forgotten, as if the anime was saying to me "Hey come on, that protagonist and all his friends died, but heh, no big deal righ' ? Who cared about 'em anyway ?"

Taking all this in consideration, I still wanted to put a 76/100 for this anime as I actually enjoyed the rest of the show - that is to say most of the episodes actually. The end disappointed me but it remains a decent show in my mind.

[EDIT : As of 11/2020, i have read the beginning of AgK zero, and I think reading this manga before seeing the anime might be worth it. It gives a nice background for Akame and Kurome, the latter being a bit underdevelopped in the anime in my opinion.]