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| Overall | Art | Animation | Character Design | Music | Series Story | Episode Story | Reviewer | |
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| Buy | 9 | 8 | 9 | 7 | 9 | 9 |
 Ggultra2764
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[series:3000#1552] |
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Death Parade is a supernatural drama focused on a mysterious tavern that is actually a place in the afterlife where bartenders called arbiters judge the souls of the recently departed through Death Games that determine whether a person's soul will be reincarnated or condemned to limbo. While episodes of the series focus around the differing visitors that visit this tavern, focus is also devoted to the staff members of the tavern as we learn more of their mentalities when it comes to judging souls and the type of world in which they inhabit. Being one of the more unique titles I've seen for a recent title, Death Parade's whole theme is focused around the value of living and the role arbiters have in judging humans that enter their tavern. A number of episodes in the series feature the arbiters making use of the Death Games to delve into the memories of the human souls they are judging to see the type of lives they lived and the events that led up to their demise in the living world. The types of Death Games delivered make use of mundane games like Twister, darts and an arcade game where any movements or successful points delivered in the game can cause pain to a specific body part of an opponent. The types of people brought to the tavern vary from those with deceptive motives, those with tragic upbringings and killers; this helping to create variety in the type of people judged by the arbiters whenever any human souls appear throughout varying points in the series. While the judgement premise above could easily have led Death Parade to be an episodic series in the vain of titles like Mushishi and Kino no Tabi - the Beautiful World (TV), the series instead opted to mix it around with exploring how life in the afterlife was at the tavern adding some continuity and variety in what could be focused on. The series explores a number of aspects to how things in the tavern are ran such as how arbiters come to be, the environment laid out with judging souls and how human souls are able to arrive into the tavern. Many of the arbiters are actually rather apathetic to the concerns of human souls as they hardly exhibit emotion or concern for the ordeals faced by humanity and the mentality behind this is slowly revealed as the series progresses. The most prominent focus within the series though is reserved for Decim and the black-haired woman who assists him in his judgements. Both have their unique things to bring to being an arbiter compared to the majority of the tavern staff with Decim showing a desire to understand more about humans and the black-haired woman being rather different in her nature compared to the other arbiters. While I won't spoil too much about what goes on with their characters, I will say that more of the black-haired woman's origins get revealed and both our leads start to question the entire reason surrounding the implementation of the Death Games in later episodes of the series as it seems to demoralize the worth of the person's existence from their eyes. Issues with Death Parade mostly come down to personal nitpicks. Beyond Decim, his assistant and the various human souls, the rest of the tavern staff get limited to little development in comparison though they aren't the primary focus of the series. Also, the ending is a rather ambiguous one as it is left unclear whether Decim and the black-haired woman's actions swayed things in regards to how the tavern would handle judging souls beyond the series. Otherwise, there is little else for me to pick apart with this series in regards to its plotting and characterization quality. With Madhouse Studios at the helm for animating this series, Death Parade offers up nicely detailed settings and character designs that depict subdued color tones to go along with the title's dark edge with its storytelling. While much of the series is set in the tavern, it still shows off varying scenic shots depicted through the memories of human souls visiting the tavern and some other parts of the afterlife that the arbiters visit. While animation isn't a major element of the series, Death Parade still offered up fluid movement of characters depicted during the varying Death Games, flashbacks and other activity seen throughout the series. Overall, Death Parade is easily among one of the year's best offerings thus far thanks to its exploration of the activity within the tavern and Decim and the black-haired woman coming to be oddities within how the afterlife judges human souls. The premise is an insightful and unique one that explores the worth of human lives through the eyes of those considering themselves not human and is worth checking out if you're looking for something out of the ordinary for an anime. Last updated Friday, March 27 2015. Created Friday, March 27 2015. | ||||||||
| Unevaluated |
 Stretch
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[series:3000#628] | ||||||
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(Four episodes watched): Apparently the games which these newly dead people are made to play are a sort of test to determine whether they deserve to go to heaven or to hell (although episode one mentioned 'reincarnation' as the fate of one person). Perhaps it's not so much whether they win or lose as whether they end up acting like assholes in their stressful situations or not. There seems to be a wide variety of 'cool' characters who will referee these games, but I don't like it when an anime basically tells me who is cool rather than letting me make that decision for myself, and that was the vibe I got. I had mixed feelings about this show; the premise is (or could be) interesting, but I couldn't help feeling that it wasn't living up to it's potential. The couple in the first episode bounced abruptly from innocent victims to despicable people, as if an attempt was being made to shock some interest out of me. Did they get a painful game because they fully deserved it? I dunno. How did the wife realize that they were already dead? Maybe the problem was that I didn't sense any sort of cathartic, meaningful conclusion, just an ugly, kind of disturbing one. Do I want to watch more of that? But maybe each episode will be radically different, and, like I said, the premise is OK, so I guess I will watch at least one more episode of Death Parade. I was thinking that each episode would feature a different newly dead person or two undergoing their game/test, but episode two was about a new 'arbiter' observing what happened in episode one as a training exercise. We get no idea who gets chosen to act as an arbiter, who makes that decision, or what their qualifications are. In fact, the verdict of reincarnation or damnation seems to be little more than a matter of opinion on their part, and there's no guarantee they have gotten it right. I certainly hope our actual fates after death aren't decided in such an arbitrary manner. After two episodes, I still cannot say whether this show will be worth watching to me. In episode three, the object of the game seemed to be more to reveal a (semi) surprising truth to a guy, rather than test him and a girl to see if they deserve to go to heaven or to hell. Why the trouble would be taken to do this, I don't know. What was the final verdict? Only two cases have been resolved, but it seems that this game is for people who died sudden, unexpected deaths with some important issue of their lives left unresolved. When it came time for me to watch episode four, I found that I didn't really didn't want to and would much rather skip it and move on to episode four of some other show. Perhaps the problem is that when we are told that the fates of the dead are determined in a fancy bar/game room, we don't particularly care whether guy X was loyal to wife Y, no, what we want to know is more about this strange system of judgment. Has God himself authorized it? Is Decim the embodiment of God? Who gets chosen to be an 'Arbiter'? What lies at the other ends of the elevator shafts to heaven and to hell? If the method by which a person gets their final judgment is as unlike what we expected as this, those places probably are as well. But it looks like this show will be about the sometimes sordid but largely humdrum cases that pass through this existential courtroom, not the courtroom itself. Since it's Decim's job to say as little as possible, he hasn't exactly developed an interesting personality. There is a touch of humor like the strange video game which a man and woman play in episode four, but not enough to make the show worth watching all by itself. I'm left thinking that this is a show with an interesting premise with lots of potential, and as a result I'm reluctant to abandon it altogether, but it hasn't done much to exploit that potential. Last updated Saturday, February 07 2015. Created Monday, January 12 2015. | ||||||||
Other Sites
| Name | URL |
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| Official Japanese Series Web Site | http://www.deathparade.jp/ |
