Review: Durarara!!

Anime, completed series, 24 episodes.

I'm told that Durarara!! (Known as Dura from here on) is a masterpiece from a writer's standpoint. That it's plot and characters are the best of any other contemporary anime. For the life of me, I can't see why.

Dura follows Ryugamine Mikado a high schooler moving to a new town, his friends Kida Masaomi, Anri Sonohara, and fifty thousand other characters; so many that both openings of the series are dedicated to naming them. We are introduced to the city of Ikebukuro where the story takes place, and the many strange people who inhabit it. Foremost is Celty Sturlson, the local urban legend who is a headless motorcycle rider. There is also talk about lingering gangs, kidnappings, serial attacks, and basically anything else you can think of. Each element is introduced early in the series, then forgotten until the second season. Celty's story is fairly interesting, and dominates the first season, but after the 13th episode she is thrown to the curb, and the magical headless motorcycle riding woman becomes nothing more than the 3 main character's personal ferry.

There are so many characters that while all of their stories fit into the main plot in some way, almost none of them are resolved. Like Celty, after they serve their part, they are totally ignored. As for the 3 we stick with, none are interesting enough to warrant a spot as a main character. Anri serves the purpose of being the only character more bland than Mikado, who spends most of his time being sheepish and entirely useless. Kida's only redeeming quality is he adds some semblance of life to the party in his loud, maybe-he's-gay way. The best characters in the entire series were the bit characters, good only because of their outrageousness (A bartender who throws vending machines, a black ex-black ops russian who know serves sushi.) At first I thought the main villain was interesting, putting people in stressful situations in the same way Jigsaw would, because "He loves humanity." I waited for more development, as he single-handedly orchestrated all the events of the series, but there was none. There was no explanation to his motivations for targeting these 3 highschoolers and changing their lives with headless riders and gang wars and soul crushing agony other than it being interesting.

The musical score tries so hard to be different and avante-garde that I actually feel sympathy for it. The series is littered with the same instances of random strings plucked on a doublebass, discordant notes on a trumpet that it manages to be more interesting than the series in it's badness.

The few highlights of this series are maybe instances from 2 episodes, which were remarkably dull considering what it could have done with it's large cast and multiple storylines. Saying that this is written well is the same as taking a shotgun full of buck to an archery range. Yes, you hit the target, but the buck is all over, and most of the pellets flew off into the distance, totally forgotten...

2/5 stars