Dracu-Riot!

Epimondas Jan 4, 2017

6.8

It is tough to say where to place this anime but I guess it could be original in it's cliched way.  Stories about: humans mixing with monsters; entering a monster world; or even getting deeper involved with monsters are fairly common and frequent in anime.  Settings taking place on an artificial island (like Strike the Blood) or in a semi or totally isolated monster world (like Rosario or Magical Warfare) which are slightly more specific than my previous generic comments are also quite common.  I can not even say a monster working for law enforcement is completely original either.  Yet this series still finds a somewhat unique niche within the cliches to stand out as semi unique among the many common stories.  I am not sure what to make of the unique condition Mutusuura eventually finds himself in because the very definition of the word used to describe it is not the same as what Yarai is even a eater version.  It is almost like calling a spoon a uber fork despite it's totally different meaning and nature. Or maybe an even more extreme comparison would be more appropriate.  So I have mixed feelings about using such a term in the unique way this series does.  It is a bit of tacky ploy often seen in manga and anime where things that do not make much sense or things that just don't have a sensible appeal for the imagery used in stories somehow makes it into a manga or anime anyway (like Akikan where girls who appear out of soda cans.)  The biggest issue however, like many anime and manga, is that it is unfinished.  By the end of the series you are left wondering "and...?".  Quite often, anime or manga like this, build up an epic story that is too big for what they deliver.  In other words, it is as if they tell their audiences we expect 40 episodes or 40 issues but the story ends by issue 12 or episode 13.  It can leave you feeling a bit let down.  It is a decent fairly imaginative story in it's own right but at the same time features alot of elements seen in many other anime, manga, or even Western shows and movies.  It maybe difficult to find enough that stands out about it apart from the crowd of so many other similar stories. I can not give a very high score to the story because of how an impression of a much bigger and much longer story prevails within it's pages but it only delivers a shortened unsatisfactory version of what it implied it would.  Art wise is a tad of a throw back in some respects given how frogface like some of the characters are.  Character development takes a hit too partly because the story is shortened before its time.  Thus not enough time is given to support characters, arch enemies (if any can even be identified within this short tale), and even the main characters suffer from lack of time to evolve well over the course of the full story.