LogFAQs > #977006432

I finished Hell's Paradise. It was pretty good! I went in with high expectations, though, and sadly it didn't quite match up to that. The premise is amazing. A bunch of convicts with crazy powers, paired up with powerful samurai who are monitoring them, go on an expedition to a freaky island looking for the elixir of life. The setting was really interesting, full of weird monsters and impossibilities. I liked most of the characters too. Sagiri and Gabimaru had a great dynamic, but other characters like Yuzuriha and Shion were good too.

My complaints mostly come down to pacing. I feel like these thirteen episodes could've easily been expanded to twice that length just to give everything more time to breathe. I hated a sequence early on that was essentially "I know we set up a bunch of neat characters, but we don't have time for them all so let's kill half of them right away". A few of the duos had very little screentime and I wanted to see more about what they were up to. Quite often, too, they would have a bunch of flashbacks to flesh out a character... literally in the moment where they're dying. Maybe I would've cared more about their sad backstory if you established it earlier, Hell's Paradise, but showing it to me when I know they're going to die doesn't really work.

I dunno. For a show with such a great setting, premise, and characters, I guess I was just disappointed that the presentation of it all kind of fell flat for me. I'm still excited for the future second season, though! It was still a solid 7/10 anime.