TLDR: DMCB lacks any substance or quality that makes a good anime. If you want something dark and edgy that explores humanity's flaws, watch Neon Genesis. That said, if you like watching people get eviscerated and titties, you'll probably like this.
I've watched a fair bit of anime in my day and thought I'd give this a try and from episode 1, I knew it was bad. I kept watching because I liked the animation style and hoped it would get better but unfortunately, the show as a whole is poorly done and has little to no merit on it's own. For context, I've not read the original manga and not seen much of Masaaki Yuasa's directing before but I imagine he would be ashamed of this compared to his other work. I'm judging this show based on it's soundtrack, allegory and themes, animation, storyline and character development and overall vibe it's trying to project. There are minor spoilers that aren't integral to the plot but are still bothersome.
For starters, the sound design for this show was probably one of it's best aspects. Any scenes featuring japanese rap or slam poetry were genuinely entertaining and the music complemented the tone of the scenes and themes of the anime pretty well. There's not much to say other than that but it's the only reason it deserves 2 stars.
The themes of the show aren't terribly presented but honestly can't be considered incredibly unique or edgy enough to deserve praise. The main characters goal is to basically stop evil from coming into the world but one is a huge douche from the start and immediately the theme is "Do the ends justify the means." There's also allegory for racism, xenophobia, etc. shoved down your throat because humanity assumes that all demons are evil. But guess what? Demons end up being all evil anyway. It was trying to say something like humanity was responsible for it's own downfall but there was a huge lack of subtlety and scenes that ended up contradicting themselves basically tore this scene apart. Besides that, people are inherently sinful in the show, kind of mirroring demonic behavior to say once again "who's really evil?" but the answer is still demons. The show tries to be introspective and critical of human behavior by showing graphic amounts of gore and nudity but these scenes are used so frequently that it stops adding to the plot at all after episode 1. It wasn't particularly shocking to me or anything, it just wasn't conducive to good writing or good directing.
Speaking of directing, let's talk about the animation. Looking at stills, you might get excited for the animation style. There are some great stills to be found in the show but for the majority, the animation is hot garbage. I haven't studied animation extensively, and I honestly liked the art style in some scenes, but for the most part, the animation is done so lazily. It's clear that budget was an issue for the show. It's hard to explain but when you watch the show critically, you'll see choppy movements, scenes too dark to make anything out, scenes where no characters have faces, animation cycles repeated excessively, just so much wrong that's done better in virtually every other anime.
There are also anime out there with much better stories. The storyline and character development are paced awfully. The villain's main motivation is just to kill humans because he's evil and the hero's motivation is to kill demons because he's good, which defeats the whole point of having a theme like "who's really evil?" There are a couple mini bosses for the main hero to defeat that amount to nothing and aren't reincorporated at any point after they're gone. Here's where the spoilers come in. One demon is in love with the main character's devil form, so he rapes and kills her. This was built up to for several episodes and there was no sign of character development afterwards and is never mentioned again. The only thought that comes from this was "What if demons aren't all bad?" which is swiftly answered by a "lol no, they definitely are" from the main character's best friend. The second mini boss looks like basically just a stronger version of the main character. Boom, the protagonist kills him in one hit. Wow, cool, good thing you only spent 30 seconds building up to him, Yuasa. Honestly, it might as well be satirical, and if you're looking for that, watch One Punch Man. Finally, the main character's best friend made it his goal to kill all demons because they were evil. Then, in episode 9, changes his mind when he finds out he's a demon. It was honestly such a shitshow what they tried to do with this character. They tried to paint him as this genius who wanted to save humanity and stuck by his convictions to a fault, but he displayed actions that showed he was a retard with no loyalty to anyone but himself. Anyone could call that he was going to be the main boss from like episode 5 at the latest. No characters had any real motivations other than good for the sake of being good or bad for the sake of being bad, and they would sometimes flip a coin to see which they were going to be that episode. Because of this, nobody looks like they have real relationships and any character actions or bonds they hold to each other are unconvincing. I've only read the plot summary for the original manga but it makes far more sense than what this show is trying to portray.
The overall tone of the show is trying to be dark and edgy and make itself more important than it deserves to be. What the director lacked in writing ability, good animators, and storyline, he made up for in trying to make the show as gross as possible. As mentioned above, it wasn't shocking to me, just excessive. At a certain point, there's no impact from seeing blood and tits, it's just more fucking blood and tits that doesn't add to anything. Gore essentially turned into filler when it lost it's shock value and it's a shame that the show is being hailed as some sort of "edgy masterpiece" when you stop caring about god damn anything that it throws at you. Some might consider it part of what the director was going for: to prove to the viewer that he could numb you to the horrors of the world, but that's giving him too much credit for how terrible everything else about this is.
So, to wrap it up, the best way to experience this show is to watch a slideshow of the few well animated parts of the show overlaid with the rap and slam poetry they do. The animation is poorly done for the most part, the gore is excessive past the point of being edgy or adding to the show in any way, the writing lacks any subtlety, the characters have no depth or motivations, the pacing is god awful, the show pretends to be deeper than it is, there's nothing to care about in this show. It's not laughably bad but it's terrible to the point that I felt it warranted a review. If you look at other reviews that praise it, you'll see that they all say "people can't take the edginess" but all these reviews are symbolic of the anime: they're made by retards and they have nothing important to say.
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