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R1 DVD Reviews
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Monday, 14 March 2005 12:25 |
 The final arc of Decendants of Darkness is a
strange beast - in some ways it's more of the same, while at the same
time the series has developed a while aspect that wasn't even hinted at
before. While Dr Muraki is still around and just as evil as ever,
it seems that Tsuzuki isn't quite what you may have assumed...
10-13 - The Kyoto File (Parts I-IV)
A serial murderer is on the
loose in Kyoto, and the only common thread to go on is that all the
victims have had clumps of their hair cut off. Tsuzuki and Hisoka are
dispatched to help out Kyoto's resident Shinigami, Wataru, who had
uncovered some useful evidence at one of the crime scenes - some of
what appears to be Muraki's hair, and DNA matching confirms it.
Muraki's too smart to get caught through careless actions, so just
what is he up to? It seems he postively wants Tsuzuki and Hisoka to
catch up to him... Meanwhile, a Kyoto scientist is using the hair that
Muraki has been gathering as part of his latest project - to create a
human clone - but does he realise what he's getting himself into by
working with Muraki?
So at the end of the day, almost the entire
series has come down to Muraki's decades-long obsession with Tsuzuki,
dating back to when Tsuzuki first died. Talk about your unhealthy
fixation - if you'd focussed on just one aim for most of your life,
you'd
be decidedly wacko as well. The real surprise is what's revealed
about Tsuzui's past, most of which
hadn't even been hinted at previously - I always feel a bit cheated
when revelations are pulled out of the hat without any sort of prior
warning, and for them to become as large a part of the story as they
did here is definitely annoying. While a lot of the previous
episodes had seemed to show that Muraki's interest was with Hisoka -
very believable, given their past history - that's thrown out in favour
of the new, Tsuzuki-based obsession.
I don't mind wild swings in a storyline, so long as they don't come
completely out of the blue, but it seems to me that almost no effort
was made to foreshadow or hint at Tsuzuki's realy nature. While
these episodes, for the most part, are engaging and enjoyable, watching
the last two while thinking 'what the hell just happened here?'
definitely puts a spoiler on things. Poor Hisoka also very much
gets the short straw from the changes, too, as he's barely featured at
all here.
The series as a whole has been well worth watching - Descendants of Darkness
is one of the more under-rated series in the past few years.
Mutterings about its yaoi side seemed to put some people off, but in
the anime at least that aspect doesn't really get dwelt on. The
ending may well throw you a bit, but not enough to spoil the
series. If the supernatural is your thing, this is worth checking
out.
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