Akame ga Kill: Anime does Civil War

Akame ga Kill is a pretty generic fighting anime. The basic idea is that the kingdom is corrupt due to an evil minister controlling a child Emperor and everyone is abusing the poor and starving the provinces.

This leads to our hero Tatsumi joining an order of assassins to destabilize the government and allow the rebel army to overthrow the kingdom restoring peace and prosperity.

The anime really isn't anything all that special. I like the visuals and the characters are entertaining but they are all fairly stereotyped. The plot for the most part, doesn't take itself all that seriously but sometimes it takes a hard left turn into very dark territory. Characters we like die off unexpectedly, usually just as their character arcs were approaching a climax but the series doesn't spend enough time and effort on this to really make a solid connection with the audience. Sometimes a character arc is introduced and then cut off with the character's death before the audience has even had time to wrap their heads around it. This is not unrealistic during war but it's not great writing either.

The show to its credit does a civil war story very well since there are several bad guys whom the show goes out of its way to make us sympathize with. It's not completely grey, the good guys are good and the bad guys are bad but they do introduce some moral complexity. The theme seems to be that in a civil war, people choose sides for all kinds of reasons and, in the end, the situation is rarely as simple as "good guys" and "bad guys."

Despite some good ideas the series doesn't really lead anywhere and it rushes to an abrupt ending in which almost everybody dies and the only survivor of our main characters agrees to take the blame for everything bad the rebel army had done during the war in order to preserve their legitimacy to rule.

I feel like the series does humor much better than it does dark so it's probably for the best it's mostly a comedy.

It's a decent and at times fun anime but I wouldn't go too far out of my way to pick it up.

Final Score:

6/10