Knight Hunters

First of all, Weiss Kreuz is a completely terrible anime. It's a passion project created by the VA's, and it clearly shows every step of the way. That being said, this anime is so bad it's completely hilarious, like The Room. Everything that happens in this anime is completely ridiculous. Nothing makes sense, emotions are muted when they don't need to be, people just casually die. If you are watching the first episode and expecting a serious anime then you are sadly mistaken. This anime is absolutely ridiculous in every way. I watched it with a friend and as we watched we constantly tore this animeapart like a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode. Story: Constantly ridiculous, and hilarious at every corner. The first episode a man dies from a van falling on him. Things get supernatural on occasion just because. People just die because the plot calls for it. It turns into an end of the world situation at one point. Characters Aya is supposed to be the cool guy but he just comes across as a sociopath half the time. Omi is supposed to be the ladies man at 17 years old, but all his relationships end in the worst ways and it makes me laugh really hard because it escalates. Yoji is supposed to seem like a cool ladies man but he's a disaster. He also is supposed to be 21 when he looks at least 30. Ken is a character in this show I guess sometimes. Brad Crawford is my friends favorite and he's basically a mary sue with huge shoulders and he can predict this ridiculous plot with ease. Schuldig is a telepath but also he has "powers" that are not explained like ever. Farfarello doesn't even have a power he's just crazy. Nagi is a baby and like 15 and they have him kiss a 27 year old woman at a point because they forgot that she wasn't a fellow teen. Sound: So all of the voice actors are seasoned professionals, but this was a passion project, especially for Koyasu (Dio Brando's voice actor). Koyasu specifically who voices Aya and he's so serious about it, but again. Aya comes off as a ridiculous psycho. They also sing the ending songs because again, this is based off a boy band. Art: So like it's not the anime's fault that it's a 90's anime. Sometimes the art can be pretty but other times it can be a huge oof moment. For instance Yoji can be very cute sometimes, but other times his eyes are so spaced apart and his hair is super puffy. If you like these designs don't get used to them, legal disputes happened so the second season they look different. Yoji becomes a cowboy for instance Enjoyment: It's really funny if again you like anime that are really dumb like this. It's like really ridiculous and I would watch it for the sake of being bad. 10/10

Did you have an anime that stuck in your head when you was a child? You watched an episode and it picks your curiosity? To me, the answer is yes. I was, maybe in grade school when I watch one of the episodes in this anime and when I was growing up I always wondering what anime it was. At first, I post the question on the anime and recommendation well, it was my fault (tee-hee) and someone said that I should post it in the Help Identifying This Anime/Character' Thread (v7). When I ask this in the The 'Help Identifying This Anime/Character' Thread (v7),thanks to Sslacker I finally watch this. Moving on, when I finished watching this anime the mission of the story are intriguing for example, in Episode 5 the sports drink that cause women slowly poison or die. This anime kinda male version of movie Charlie's Angels. The story has no element of surprise because the twist is predictable. I'm kind of piss off seeing the assassin licking their weapon my goodness, that again its a repetitive gif that makes boredom. I'm giving forewarn to those who will watch this because it is a series of tragedy. The art is like a drawing or sketch of a grade school on his/her notebook. The colors of the outfit of the guys are little off. To me, the sound is corny or uncool it doesn't fit on the four guys. The characters did not even develop their skills are still the same. Overall, I'm disappointed because I was looking forward to watch this only to find out it has a mediocre story and art even the ending was confusing.

Story: 4/10 I gotta admit, I was intrigued by this anime because (like any girl) I'm a sucker for the pretty boys, but pretty boys don't make good plots. Too predictable, too "safe" and definately TOO stupid. I can't stand an anime I can easily predict and doesn't have enough substance to keep me interested. Sadly this anime lacked all of the above and more. Art: 5/10 The art wasn't TERRIBLE but it wasn't the BEST either, it was more average than anything. The facial expression lacked emotion, the women were poorly drawn (how any of them fell for those women is beyond me) and it was justa boring style of art. Just too bland for my taste sadly and it wasn't balanced properly, meaning the men and women should be equally good looking or bad looking. This shows the artist has the ability to be diverse in his/her art, and not focus on one gender or the other. Sound: 3/10 The opening and ending were alright, but the music within the anime was bland and the insert songs SUCKED. I hate to say that but lets face it the VA's for the main characters are not meant for singing. They could've gotten better voice actors, Aya's voice was hardly fitting I find, and Omi's was far too underdeveloped. Characters: 5/10 You can't really sympathize with them, well you can sometimes but it's hard to really connect with them when their kinda devoid of a whole lot of inbetween emotions. Their either one way or another, the only one that's typically indifferent is Aya and he's so bland, rice is more appealing. Omi tries to act too grown for his age, Yoji is just your typical male player, and Ken is so boring thinking about him makes me sleepy. The characters are only good looking, there is nothing deep and profound happening beyond the surface. Enjoyment: 5/10 I was being nice frankly, I enjoyed the first 9 eps after that I felt more like I was forcing myself to finish rather than enjoying myself. It's really an anime I wouldn't suggest (and believe it or not a friend of mine suggested I not watch it, should've listened). So enjoyment was kind of absent after episode 9 sad to say. Overall: 4/10 The anime had more potential, it could've created more original characters, a better plot, and done better with the music score. It just felt like they were sorta tight on money so they grabbed a couple people off the streets, gave them the lines and called it a day. It felt like little effort went into it. So I am unfortunate to say that this wasn't the worst anime, but it's certainly on the top 20 list.

If you would have to summarize Weiß Kreuz very short, it would be: all style, no substance. Weiß Kreuz suffers from a variety of things. And most can be traced to its origin. Being the thought-child of one of the Voice Actors, it clearly shows in the lack of quality in general. I don't want to lash out on him, but the writers didn't really know what they did with this. And the two biggest flaws, in my opinion, are the lack of direction and the lack of vision for the whole story. The episodes follow a monster of the week style approach with an over-arcing narrative.In the first episodes everything is connected to a bad guy, but he didn't do much except committing crimes all the time. And not like petty crimes. This is full blown: hosting a death-match casino, kidnapping people for hunting and kidnapping people to extract their organs, to name a few things. Not to mention that he becomes the prime minister and then throws the country into martial law just to find 4 people. He also lacks any kind of backstory, sympathy or insight into his character, making him flat, unappealing and in general one-dimensional. While this problem affects primarily the enemies, especially the last bad guys, the main cast isn't deeply written either. We have revenge-for-sister boy, revenge-for-partner boy, revenge-for-failed-sports-career boy and revenge-for-lost-childhood boy. Until like 20 episodes in, I was always forgetting that some of those characters are the main cast, as they tend to stay so underdeveloped. And its the failure to these characters that drags the whole thing down ultimately. The tertiary cast also feels the same. While mostly they only get one or two episodes, as per format, they mostly tend have a connection with the main cast and go into peril or die, just so the main cast reacts to this. Now while writing this I realise an additional flaw. The cast only reacts in the whole series. They never act upon anything. Their boss says: "Kill this dude. He is bad." And the main cast goes: "OK." or "Why should we?". Sometimes a few of the cast left the episode in total, because of disinterest and not because they see a personal dilemma in doing so. This reaction theme not only tends to go through the whole thing, but also in specific moments, where the cast just starts to scream because something happened. When this happened it always left a weird taste behind because it sometimes felt so random. This appears most prominently when one of the main cast cries about a girl he knew for a very short time gets killed. The audience knew her for at most 15 minutes and it is just weird when the main cast then displays such a hard reaction. They partially go into a depression because of certain deaths. Which is totally fine and understandable. But here comes the most prominent problem. Due to the aforementioned lack of vision certain important topics are, at most, only scraped at, when the main cast discusses or experience them. This goes for the depression after losing a loved one, consultation of raping/kidnapping victims and, most importantly, the hardship of being an assassin. All these things happen in the series and in real-life, but the series always fails to make a statement to these things. The only real thing you can sense from those scene is: "When you do them, people hunt you for it." While it seems that I really disliked the story and the characters, I mostly feel uninterested by them. Nothing about them is iconic, fun or interesting in general. These unappealing features were most prominent to me, when i dreaded to further watch this series albeit I wanted to finish it just to write this review to end my relationship with it. But there is one more thing. The art. The animation in Weiß Kreuz is dreadful. MAL encapsulates it perfectly with the 2 scoring. While some would argue that the art looks fine for an 80s anime, it is from 1998. The artwork is mostly static with shifts and partly repeated zooms. This is most notable in the action sequences which have little to no choreography as there is at most 1 active character on screen. Weirdly timed cuts and the one-sidedness of the angles makes the action hard to follow at times. Additionally, most notable in the second half, the artwork is partly completely off-model, creating hideous still images which linger for 2 to 10 seconds. The only good parts of the animation and the still poses which the series over-utilized to an extend that it became boring again. This is also why I noticed it at the beginning. This series is all about style with no substance. The characters lack interest, the story is very detached from reality, especially when psychic powers become a common occurrence and the art is offensively lazy for an 1998 anime.