Gilgamesh Review - 87/100
After the fun, light-hearted and brightly coloured Kero Kero Chime, the obvious next thing would of course be a mysterious dark and gritty horror-series. Enter Gilgamesh, a series that fits this description perfectly. Ad in the end, Gilgamesh turned out to be an excellent series, and a great recommendation for any Japanese-styled horror-fan.
In Gilgamesh, it’s not the storytelling or the dialogue that stand out (they both do their job, but they’re nothing extraordinary), but instead the story and characters themselves are the highlight of this series. A large part of the series is a character-study, backed up by an excellent story that knows how to build up and back up said characters. The characters are surprisingly down to earth and aside from some of the lesser important “villains”, every character is fleshed out and developed. This series continues to get better once it hits its second half, but the first half also has a couple of pretty memorable moments.
One thing I like about mystery-series is their ending: they’re either complete flops or pure excellence, depending on how creative the scriptwriters are feeling. As for Gilgamesh: you’ll either love or hate it, because the ending is unconventional to say the least. I personally loved the final episode, but if you prefer your endings to be along the lines of “Hero saves the world and gets the girl”, you won’t be too happy with it.
As for the bad points: the animation. The character-designs are actually gorgeous, and they will make you think that a good guy is actually a bad guy when you first see him (or her), but a number of shots in the first half have characters walking around like a bunch of thunderbirds, and this series also gratefully likes to re-use animation of previous episode. The storyline also has a few bugs here and there around the middle: in the world of Gilgamesh, computers are supposed to have stopped working, but at one point a character suggests to look up some information on a computer, but this is nothing major.
I also feel that the background of the lead children could have been a bit more elaborate. Don’t get me wrong, their backgrounds are complete, we just hardly get to see anything of it apart from a large number hints here and there. I guess that this was done to give these kids an air of mystery, but at the moment I’m still edging to know how Tatsuya’s mother changed, and in what kind of mess Fuko and Madoka were before the story began. Overall though, I had a great time watching this. I often had to force myself to stop watching in order to do other things, because the cliff-hangers kept making me hungry to see more of the storyline.