Legend of DUO Review

story 6/10

What do you get when you cross a bishounen vampire with a gun? Something that should have been a lot better than Legend of DUO!

I had heard nothing but negative things about this series before viewing, but decided to check it out for myself. While not nearly as bad as I’ve been seeing in reviews elsewhere, it definitely has many factors that make it not in my top 50. Story-wise, the best non-spoiling description can be found in the AniRec entry. Basically, humans are dying off and trying to hurt vampires to save themselves (for a reason that DUO shared to the humans, thus causing him to become an outcast amongst his fellow vampires). Zieg is a vampire with close ties to DUO, and even though they have an intense history together, for some reason he now wants to defeat DUO for what he did. And then the confusion begins...

What should have been a straightforward revenge (but why??) story turned into something fragmented and scattered. We are shown flashbacks at least half of the time, often relating to scenes shown just prior, but other times coming out of nowhere. It’s hard to tell, at times, what is really in the present and what is a flashback. Combine this with story details that aren’t explained at all, or seem to be giant plot holes. For example, how is it that vampires are killed? Especially, without spoiling, due to the reason why the humans want to hurt the vampires. What’s up with this disease and what does it really do? It’s guessable, but never really explained. Why is Zieg out for revenge? Etc, etc. The ending is just as rushed as the rest of the series (as the 12 episodes are only 5 minutes each), and ultimately you leave the series feeling very unfulfilled.

animation 3/10

It’s unfortunate that the budget for Legend of DUO was clearly insanely low, because the background scenery shots and overall character designs were gorgeous (with the exception of Zieg’s uber mullet hair). Take a look at the screenshots in the AniRec; BEAUTIFUL scenery, and pretty bishounen characters. So where did it go wrong? Well, every other aspect of the animation. First of all, there isn’t much animation at all. Characters stand still with plain backgrounds (or, for example, in a few shots a character was attacking and had literally neon lines behind him... uhhh), or pieces of characters are placed on the screen one by one, sort of like what a manga page looks like. Then there’s the occasional real life footage clip thrown in out of nowhere, and the still scenes. So pretty much everything about the animation was bad, except the gorgeous backgrounds and character designs, and the overall coloring; for example, the glowing red eyes of the vampires were fairly neat.

sound 2/10

Baaaad. Imagine the worst techno/guitar song ever and then play it over and over. There was literally nothing unique or interesting about the music accompaniments. Don’t watch this for the music. The voice actors were ok though.

characters 3/10

Again another area that suffers. Because of all the crazy flashbacks it’s hard to keep track of who was involved in what scenario. We get vague ideas of some of the characters’ pasts, but not nearly enough to actually have any sort of emotional involvement with them. It’s never really clear what Zieg and DUO’s relationship is, with hints of shounen-ai going on. There are a variety of other characters but none are worth mentioning.

overall 4/10

The main thing that Legend of DUO has going for it is the beautiful scenery shots. Other than that, there’s little good to be gained from watching it. Vampire completists might want to add this to their collection, but other than that I think you’d be better off watching a different vampire series, or different series altogether.