After the disappointment of Cyberpunk 2077 on the ps4 the anime gods blessed us with Akudama Drive except they only blessed half of it. Akudama Drive gives us amazing animation with cool visuals pact with great action that does not take ages to develop with a nice and unique story set in dystopian future in Kansai. Even though the story does fall a bit off near the end of the series it didn’t stop me enjoying the first half of the series which is the sole reason why I continued watching the series as a whole.

Plot 7/10

Akudama Drive is a story about 7 criminals who have sentences of a minimum of 500+ years (basically a life sentence) and they do risky jobs for a large sum of money while being pursued by the police. The show was filled with great and gruesome moments notably in the very first few episodes when they were going to save cutthroat, it was very intriguing to see the main characters mercilessly murder members of the police force with no unnecessary dialog or development needed. The show doesn’t take long to develop and doesn’t keep the viewer at bay and gets straight to the point which I thoroughly enjoy. As a whole, the first half of the series was worth watching and time well wasted as there was a clear development and goal that I wanted to see. however, the same cannot be said for the second half of the series, even though there were clear developments between different characters and the story it was just not progressing the way I hoped it would, the story began to shift from logical and unique standpoints and started to become more like a battle royal with a hint of political rising and mass killings it just didn’t feel right. on top of that, it probably had one of the worst endings I have ever seen in anime a cliché battle against an enemy with zero development.

Characters 6/10

Not much can be said about the characters in Akudama Drive because, one the story just went completely south in the latter half of the series and two only a handful of character development really mattered mainly because most of them ended up dead or were missing in action, but the ones that were developed were alright at best, the main character at first was seen as a completely innocent normal human being who has never committed a crime before, however as time went on spending time with criminals and building connections with different characters we saw a change in character and transition from being this innocent human being to becoming a killer who would save their friends when needed to, the writer made it clear that there was this shift in character and personality when he made the main character cut her hair which symbolised a new birth of character. In total it was Pretty generic but that’s pretty much the only character development we really got.

Art/Animation 8/10

Akudama Drive brings a Danganronpa theme art style which I see as very unique and pleasant to watch, the art style gave a futuristic look while making scenes that emphasises poor neighbourhoods truly show the struggle some characters face, furthermore the animation was suburb, the fight scenes, the killings, the movement was all smooth with its own unique style, one scene that truly fascinated me was the very first fight between the executioners and Akudama even though there could have been some minor fixtures the fight scenes was amazing, packed with great choreographs fights that flowed amazingly well. Lastly the colours, one thing that Akudama Drive does well is using a mixture of dark and bright colours to make scenes better to watch, it also plays a great part in showing futuristic cities and gives an accurate view of how it might look.

Music 7/10

The ending and opening were great. They fitted with the style and plot of this show and what I mean by this is the sounds and instruments fitted the sci-fi/futuristic genre they were trying to express, the visuals in the opening and ending were beautifully fused with light and dark colours which amazed me as its rare to see animes with great visual openings and endings. Not much can be said about the ost mainly because the action overshadowed it but as a whole, it was pretty bland and generic.

Enjoyment 6.5/10

Well, where do I begin. The show had a lot of potential with a good story pact with amazing visuals however as the episodes went on and the story started to go south my enjoyment started to decrease, it became very difficult to watch the latter half of the series as I just couldn’t see how the story was going to pan out it, fused with bland and generic storylines it just became increasingly difficult to watch, therefore I decided to give a 6.5 mainly because the first half carried the show for me without the first half my enjoyment levels would have probably been a solid 4.

Overall 7/10

Overall This show was alright but it did begin to fall off near the end of the series, the plot was unique and was filled with beautiful art pact with great action fight scenes that was starting to form a great series, the latter half of the series well it did start to fall off a bit which did tarnish this series as a whole but the first half was enough for this show to be a 7. If this was a two cour or more the way this series was going it could have easily become a solid 5 or 4 but luckily this was only a one cour series. All in all, I would recommend people to watch this show however only up to episode 8 as that is where the series begins to fall off.

As always thank you for reading make sure to check out my other reviews on Haikyu. If you want to talk about anime/manga or want to debate about the scoring that I gave in some of my reviews feel free to add me on Anilist or Discord.
Discord: Chungu5#1753