Jack The Ripper above wanted to deflect attention away from himself, but eventually failed, arrested and brought to trial. Unlucky unlike his original counterpart at London.
Nowadays after almost quitting flyff, I returned to watching more anime. Today I presented to you a short review of the first series of the detective genre reviewed by me, Tantei Gakuen Q. Really need to finish that FF12 game later after this, I am almost there already.
Story:-
Kyu, our main protagonist with Naruto-esque voice, enrolled in Dan Detective School (DDS) as a candidate to succeed Morihiko Dan, a legendary detective in Japan and the only one who can carry a pistol. What is so special about being the only detective who can carry a concealed pistol is beyond me. Anyway, Kyu alongside his classmates in the Q class, spend the rest of the series solving homicide mysteries as they compete between themselves to become Morihiko Dan’s successor.
The whole 45-episode series takes only roughly about one-third of the manga storyline, and as the result of that, this series ends with so many questions unanswered and without a real ending. Throw in a couple of original case mysteries, and that’s it for this anime. This series definitely needs a second season (or more) and the ending of the anime really has been set up to accommodate one.
The series start up very different compared to the manga, omitting some details while adding new ones as replacements before settling into the main storyline. Most of the time, these deviations from the manga are done very well, unlike many manga-based anime series such as School Rumble. This is one of the strongest positives for this series.
Storytelling of the original manga homicide cases are done very faithfully, and this is where the series really shines. I watched the anime, already knowing who’s the murderer is every time but that fact does not really stop me from watching the series. The animation of the static pages I have read reminded me how much I like this series. Complete in colour to boot! While original anime homicide cases are not done as well as the manga ones (the city bombing one must have been shoved there to counter critics that DDS students only do homicide cases, like CSI) they are nevertheless still watchable.
Character design:-
Not exactly inspiring, let’s just say it is forgettable. And the amount of characters having black hairs are minuscule, mostly reserved to secondary characters. Green, pink and purple rules the day.
Voice acting:-
Kyu’s voice acting is strongly similar to Naruto, in fact I suspect they have the same voice actress until I checked that this is not the case. If Naruto’s voice actress got sick or something, the producer knows to call on Megumi Ogata. After all, she has piloted EVA Unit 1. Anyway, the voice acting here is pretty good, and probably a little bit better than Jigoku Shoujo.
Music:-
My hope went up when listening to the first OP theme, but it swiftly goes down the drain after a listless OST and other themes.
Animation/Direction:-
Animation is one of the drawbacks of this series. It is easily observable that the animation is way below average, and failed most of the time in fast-paced scenes. There are also problems with lip-sync in this series. Direction otherwise, is quite good although not unlike the best ones like Jigoku Shoujo.
Conclusion:-
6 out of 10. Bad animation, unfinished storyline and hopeless music hits this series really hard.
Poor little cutie a.k.a. murderer. If you did not meet Kyu you would have gotten away with it.
