Akame ga Kill: Fun Ride, But Could Be Better

Here's a series that I wish that I could like more than I did. While it had great action sequences and some nice art with a premise that should have worked well, the whole thing got mired in how the story didn't spend enough time developing its characters while lining them up like bowling pins to be killed off. It's too bad because if it had put a little more effort into that, Akame ga Kill could have been a much better show.

It starts off well enough with the main character, Tatsumi, arriving in the capital hoping to find a way to help his poor village on the outskirts of the kingdom. Before long, he discovers that the place is actually quite corrupt with very bad people in high places. When taken in for the night by a noble family that turn out to be complete sadists with a taste for torture, he meets the members of Night Raid, a team of assassins with the Revolutionary Army who are tasked with hunting down particularly evil government officials and killing them. Once Tatsumi sees the nobles for the monsters they are he understands that the empire in which he lives is actually rotten, and with that joins the assassins.

From here we follow Tatsumi and Night Raid as they do their part to bring down the empire, killing off corrupt officials and potential threats as the military enlists specialists of their own to deal with the assassins. What makes this fun to watch are the weapons used by the team members and high ranking members of the empire's military called Imperial Arms. They were made 1,000 years earlier and much of the knowledge to create them has been lost, but they are very powerful. Each one is different with its own special power, so we see people running around with rifles with enough oomph to shoot down spacefaring battleships, incredibly powerful armor, teleportation devices, ice attacks, sentient organic Arms, et cetera. This leads to several huge battles as people clash, which is the high point of the show.

Unfortunately, this leads to a lot of the main characters, both heroes and villains, dying. A lot. The problem with this is that Akame ga Kill doesn't spend enough time developing its characters for the viewer to really get hit hard when one of them dies. We'll get a few minutes one episode explaining their past and an episode or two later they'll be dead. The first death or two does have a bit of shock value as the show makes it clear that this will be a thing, but after that it never gets to the point where viewers genuinely worry about who will be next to go, instead developing more of a morbid curiosity as to who will get killed off. As such, there isn't much power to the deaths. It's spectacle and little more. The only person I was sad to see go was Tatsumi since he was built up over the entire series, while everyone else to go was just cannon fodder. Bols is the only other character I feel got barely enough development to deserve some sympathy when he died. By the end of the series, there's pretty much a mountain of corpses seeing as so many characters got killed off and mostly I found myself trying to remember why I should care about them in the first place. If the show had spent more time developing people and being more selective as to who would die, it would have had a much stronger impact than going the route that it did with this.

At least the show looked pretty and had a decent soundtrack. The characters were reasonably well designed with some over the top aesthetics from time to time. Seryu stood out here with her prosthetic limbs that could be replaced with ridiculous artillery. Susanoo when he was transformed looked pretty bad ass. Esdeath got the military dominatrix thing down and I look forward to the day when someone can truly pull off some solid cosplay of her. The animation of the battles also had a nice sense of speed and seemed to get the gore to a good level with just the right amount of gratuity to match the depravity of the empire. I also liked how people's faces contorted when they let their inner demons get the better of them. Music too was well done. There's not much to say about it, but the tunes worked well with the show.

On the whole, I don't regret the time I spent watching Akame ga Kill. The action made for a fun ride and it was nice to see the empire get its comeuppance, but the way in which the show took the axe to so many of its characters felt like killing for the sake of killing and it became easy to get numb to it. This show could have been a lot more interesting if its characters were better developed. At least then, I'd care more when someone died off. As it stands, the show feels like something to watch on a stream when one has a hankering for a lot of combat with liberal amounts of gore and a relatively straightforward "fight the power" story line, which isn't all together bad, but at the same time it's hard not to feel that Akame ga Kill could have been more than that.