This show blew its chances at being named among the greats in anime. The end (and a lot leading up to it) kind of ruined it. It started out so well too. It's a about this kid named Ganta Igarashi, who one day at school sees his entire class slaughtered by this "Red Man" as Ganta dubs him. This Red Man, for whatever reason, leaves him alive and gives him superpowers that allow him to use his blood as a weapon. Ganta actually is blamed for this crime, found guilty, and is sent to Deadman Wonderland, a place where the send criminals to participate in all sorts of fight to death games for the amusement of the general public. Okay, this sounds amazing right? And it was
. until other stuff happened, but I'll get there later. Watching Ganta try to fight and survive is quite cool and entertaining and I really wish they would have stuck with him having to fight and eventually become a real badass and have him take on the Red Man at the end. Unfortunately, that didn't happen and we got
. what we got. Before I start ranting about this shows problems, I'll finish the positives about it. The animation is fantastic. All the fight scenes look incredible and everything else is all shiny and polished, which is always a plus. Last positive is the character of Shiro. Shiro is absolutely, without a doubt the best part of this show. She is funny, adorable, cute, badass, and provides a much needed relief from Ganta's
lets call it whining. Now with the bad, and believe me, there is a lot. Like I said before, the show doesn't stick with the whole Ganta struggling to survive aspect. It begins to veer into a kind of fight the power storyline, and it didn't really work in my opinion. Ganta meets these rebels in the prison, and they all try escape and yeah it goes from there. All this storyline did was 1) limit Ganta's abillity to become a more powerful badass and 2) brought on a ridiculous amount of pointless secondary characters with no development whatsoever. Ganta as a character is also a bad aspect of the show. Like I said before, he never really grows as a character or in physical strength, leaving him to be quite bland and uninteresting. Now both of those things aren't enough for me dislike a show as much as I disliked this one. Hell, Sword Art Online had both of these issues and I could watch that without a TON of cringing. No, no, no, no Deadman Wonderland had another, more terrible issue. It had possibly the worst ending to any movie/TV show that I have ever seen. The end literally happens with Shiro and Ganta sitting on a roof. That is it. Answer the many, many, MANY questions the viewer may have had? Nonsense. Why would that be a good idea? You know, it's not like people watch the show to find out what happens. That would be stupid. Seriously though, it answers literally none of the questions it proposes. In fact, the end leaves you with more questions than before! After the credits rolled, I stared open mouthed at the screen, seriously thinking there had to be more. I couldn't understand how incompetent you would have to be to say "yeah, that was a perfect ending" and then actually put it in the show. Alas, the end we got is true (unless you count the manga, which I don't) and I have never been so disappointed in my life. I think this show would have fared much better from 25 or 26 episodes, not 13. The beginning of the show feels like they planned for 25, 26, but once they found out they were only getting 13 they rushed and tried to cram too much into too little. Unfortunately, Deadman Wonderland will go down in history as the show that could have been. Sigh.
