Death Parade-Review

Warning! This review may contain spoilers. 

After having this anime recommend to me by many people, I finally binge watched it last night and WOW! That roller coaster of emotions was crazy.

Each episode of this anime had me shedding a good amount of tears. I thought only the beginning would be like this but the last few episodes were even worse. Even now that I’m done with it, my heart can’t help but break a little. I still feel so many emotions after it. This anime really got under my skin. 

For those of you who haven’t watch the anime and don’t know what it’s about, here’s my summary of it:

What happens after someone dies? Some think that they either go to heaven or to hell depending on the good and bad deeds they’ve done. In this case, there’s no heaven or hell. After a person dies, they’re sent to a casino type place called Quindecim where they’re forced to play a game. They can’t leave this place until the game is finished. Quindecim workers are arbiters who cast judgement on the recently dead and determine whether their soul is cast into the dark void or reincarnated. There are four rules for an arbiter: 

1. Arbiters cannot quit making judgments, for that is the reason why they exist.

2. Arbiters cannot experience death, for that would bring them too close to being human.

3. Arbiters cannot feel emotion, for they are only puppets.

*4. Arbiters may not work hand in hand with life, for that will ruin them 

(*this rule is revealed at the end of the anime which was added in by Oculus after seeing Decim judge Chiyuki)

The newly dead who come into Quindecim are not suppose to remember that they’re dead. Knowing they died makes them unable to play the game that helps judge them. This is what ended up happening to Chiyuki; because she wasn’t able to play the game, they extended her judgement and made her into an assistant for Decim, an arbiter. Decim has been an arbiter for five years but his judging is a little different from the others. Nona, the manager of Quindecim, thinks that there might be different ways of judging and puts Decim to test her theory by working with Chiyuki. Because Chiyuki is human, Decim ends up feeling emotions after spending so much time with her. Chiyuki teaches Decim that having emotion is okay and they might actually help him in understanding the humans he judges.

This anime was just so amazing! I honestly don’t know how to describe it. I usually try to steer away from anime like this because I don’t like being so vulnerable and end up crying all over the place. Sometimes you just gotta put yourself out there and hope to come across something amazing like this.

For those of you who didn’t get it already, this anime is about death. The name of the anime and the opening music is ironic to the theme of the general anime. I feel like the anime is trying to make light of the situation. The opening music talks about the good side of death and the ending talks about the bad side of it. What I liked about this anime was that every person that comes into Quindecim gets a second chance to find some type of closure before their soul is either cast into the void or reincarnated. It really makes you think about life and death. It also shows that you can’t really judge people solely on who they are on the surface. They might be feeling completely different inside from what they show on the outside. It would be kinda scary if this was real. To have someone, an arbiter, decide where your soul goes from memories that are sent to him/her and from a difficult scenario, that’s just not cool. I definitely wouldn’t want Ginti to be the one that decides my faith. He’s a cold-hearted jerk.

SPOILER AHEAD!

Speaking of him, remember how he judged Mayu and that singer Harada? The episode after Ginti judges them and decides their faith, why is Mayu still with him? I didn’t understand the whole scene where Ginti is making her choose someone else’s soul over Harada. I thought Harada and Mayu’s souls have already been determined? Then  Ginti ends up sending both Harada and Mayu into the void. What was that all about? Why wouldn’t they be sent to reincarnation? I hope that in the second season Decim is able to smack some sense into him. 

Awww Decim. He and Chiyuki remind me of the main characters from the movie warm bodies. Decim is the zombie that comes across a living human that makes him feel all kinds of emotions that he never thought possible. That last episode of death parade was everything. I liked how they gave the problem a solution and didn’t leave us hanging. We still have the problem about Oculus and what he might do about Nona’s little experiment. That will probably be dealt with in a deeper level next season. 

I can’t wait for next season! Have you guys already seen Death Parade? What did you think about it? What other anime do you recommend?