In modern Tokyo, the people never see the sky. That is, the sky is covered up by what is called “Hell’s Gate.” With the Hell’s Gate appears these people called “Contractors”. These Contractors have special powers in exchange for giving up their human emotions AND performing a sacrifice (i.e. breaking off one’s own fingers). Hei goes undercover as a Chinese student traveling abroad to murder other contractors and beings. Along the way, he sometimes gets wrapped up in the cases of different people. So far he has already had strong interactions with two young women. One turned out to be a literal human doll and the other permanently lost her consciousness and blew up everything into flames.

Despite the fact that I’m blogging four episodes at once, there isn’t really that much to say about this show. This show is very mysterious and it never reveals too much at once. It seems as if every two episodes are grouped into arcs that are loosely related so a lot of things remain mysterious as ever. There’s also a lot of characters and situations going on here. It’s not a world just full of contractors and non-contractors. There are different types of contractors and they all don’t get along with each other. On top of all this, there’s the police whose job is to hunt down contractors that are causing ruckus apparently.

Because of this whole mysterious and complicated feel (and the fact that this is all split up into arcs concerning different people), there’s not a whole lot known about the characters. We only have a basic portrait of each character which slowly clears up with each passing episode. That’s not to say that these characters are boring at all. On the contrary, most of them seem to be rather developed and unique. There’s two characters I want to complain about though. The first one is Hei. Out of all the characters, he seems to be the most cliche with the “clueless act” and then in reality he’s the unforgiving cold type. I swear I’ve seen that exactly personality before. He really reminds me of L from Death Note and that drives me up the wall. The other girl that bothers me is the blue haired girl that always has her hands in the water and that’s because it seems like there’s so much about her. The problem is that after four episodes I literally know NOTHING about her. This blue haired girl literally has the whole ending theme dedicated to her. I want to know why she has it dedicated to her at least. I guess I’m getting too worked up over this show.

The animation for this series is VERY solid. It’s clean and crystal clear. It’s also very fluid and rather realistic. When that guy was breaking his fingers, I felt rather nauseous because it looked so painful. So a plus over there. I should also mention that there’s quite a bit of gore in some episodes too. So if you have no tolerance for blood you might one to think three times before checking out this series.

Overall this is a very top notch series with a dark feel. While it’s lacking a plot as of yet, it makes that up with its foreboding atmosphere and mysterious cast of characters. If you want to watch something rather goth (I can’t think of a better word at the moment), you should definitely check this out. I’m going to be blogging this series by arcs from now on so the next entry will probably be on episode 5-6. Till then.

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Category: Episode Synopsis

I believe myself~