Kingdom - 1

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May I just preface this by saying that this is the first and LAST review I will be doing for Kingdom and I also decided to only included 4 screencaps, because I don't want to waste any space by uploading any more for this series.

Prior to the airing of any episodes of the Summer season, this series was at the top of my watch list after I took the time to read whatever chapters of the manga I could find online. The manga is serialised in Young Jump alongside other popular seinen manga such as Gantz, Liar Game and Zetman so I was a little surprised that Studio Pierrot, which is famous for the production of many shonen manga adaptations, was the studio in charge but I wasn't discouraged because TMS had done a decent job with Zetman; given the studio's well done adaptations (for the most part) I placed my faith in them to deliver a decent seinen adaptation.

I was so wrong to trust Studio Pierrot. This first episode was the worst piece of shit I have ever seen and that's not an exaggeration, in fact it took me about 6 hours to attempt to watch this 50 minute train wreck. Why

Let's put aside the ugliness of the 3D animation which can be considered the biggest eyesore in animation history ever (looks like a Total War game played on a 7-year-old laptop) and let's focus on the mutilation of the source material. I understand that some pieces will take various liberties with the manga they are adapting in order to either compress more of the story into a short adaptation or to edit certain chapters/arcs that aren't really suitable for an anime but to actually make a mockery out of the manga by just animating it poorly is a whole other thing:

The intensity of the fights - gone due to the 3D.

The story itself - ruined by the 3D and soundtrack.

The characters - can you guess what made them terrible

The list can go on and on but I simply don't have the willpower or time to list every single fault brought on by the animation.

I'd also like to point out that the choice of having a 50 minute first episode was also a poor choice; this isn't Fate/zero where the first episode actually needed the 50 minutes, this episode could have been done in the conventional 20 minutes.

So was there anything good about this first episode

Heed my words, there was NOTHING. The only good thing that came about from this episode was my decision to never even consider watching it again; that and the fact that the first episode finally ended. Even without the 3D the anime was seriously lacking and failed to capture the essence of the manga, but instead decided that if you can make it more shonen then you should, something that is bound to piss off anyone who reads the manga and makes me sad for the manga artist of the series.

Finally I would like to make a request to Studio Pierrot and that is for them to pull this thing off the air and either re-work it as a normal 2D anime or just scrap the entire project for the sake of all the viewers because 37 more episodes of this would make me hate ever having gotten into anime. This looks like a second-rate game, fix it!