Anime Review: Soul Eater

I think I started reading Soul Eater when the anime was airing (in Japan) and I just didn't care for the sub. So, Funimation licensed it, I waited for the dub, tried that and loved the dub voices more. I'd been watching what episodes they had up on hulu but recently all the dubbed episodes ended up on Netflix as well so I marathoned through them in a few days. Good thing too, not only is hulu being weird but the last bit of Soul Eater definitely isn't the best.

Soul Eater

 Summary: The DWMA (death weapon meister academy, in Japanese it's just Shibusen) is a school run by Death himself for training people who can become weapons* and people who wield those weapons. It's the goal of Soul and Maka (and every other weapon meister team in the academy) to make Soul into a deathsycthe, a super powerful weapon wielded by the grim reaper but it's a lot harder than it sounds.

The Good: I think I've said it before but I always hate it when you have a story where there are two characters who are perfect foils for each other and yet never work together. So I love the fact that we have three teams of people who work well together and they form an even bigger team, it made me realize just how much I was missing that in the current manga chapters. And the first two-thirds or three-fourths of the series was good, it was pretty faithful to the manga, made sense, flowed pretty well, and it was just plain fun to watch.

The Bad: Okay, so people in Japan (like in every country) can write. They can write novels, LNs, manga and original anime, so why the heck do they do anime original endings so badly? I've seen BONES come up with with original stories that worked much better than the ending of Soul Eater did and I'm baffled as to why it was so bad (and I truly found it awful, at least three literal deus ex machina and the power of heart save the day? BLEUGH). That's my biggest problem with the show, I hated the last fourth of it and since I loved the first three parts so much I really don't know if I want to buy this or not.

The Art: Well, everyone says that this looks like what would happen if Time Burton made an anime so I suppose that's as good a description as any. The fights scenes vary a bit in quality (I thought they were all pretty good, this is BONES after all) and the designs didn't change much from the manga.

The Music: I ended up liking the dub quite a bit. The main 9 or so characters all had good voices (yes, Black Star's voice does get better, why it took so long to get the voice right I don't know) although I didn't like the voices of some of the side characters as well but most of them were pretty good. The OP/EDs were alright but I think I liked the EDs more overall.



*I know I know, pretty much everyone says they're weapons who have human forms but since the manga shows they were born human, not made, I think it's more accurate to say it the other way.