DaWaRou Posts: Katekyo Hitman Reborn, Part 1 The Review

Hello everyone! I'm back today with a review rather than a news story so YAAAAAAAAAAAAY! Anyways let's not waste any time in getting into this because depending on how I do this, it might end up as a two posts instead of one. I'm John Cortez and this is my 24th post for...The Broken Infinte.

So...going into this blog post, I'm a little apprehensive. I like the series that I'm reviewing, don't get me wrong but...there's just soooo much to loathe about it. No, its not Naruto or Bleach. I already did one of those a while ago and it wasn't all that good anyways. Today...we'll be looking at Akira Amano's long running Shonen series, Katekyo Hitman Reborn.

No point turning back now. The plot is this: Below average  dimwitted loser Tsunayoshi Sawada is probably the biggest loser on the face of the earth. He's scared of almost everything, his grades are horrible, his looks are...meh and he's completely inept at all things in life. In other words, he should be the lead of a Harem series as opposed to an Action series. But his life completely changes when a baby in a suit and a fedora shows up at his house one morning claiming to be Reborn, the worlds greatest Hitman and the one who shall be Tsuna's home tutor. He tutors Tsuna by physically abusing him in every way possible but that's besides the point. He also is constantly shooting Tsuna in the head with magical bullets called Dying Will Shots which will revive a person so long as they had a single regret when they were shot with it. This is nothing compared to the veritable bomb he drops on Tsuna at the end of episode one in which he explains that Tsuna is the tenth generation heir to the illustrious Vongola crime family. CONGRATS TSUNA! YOU GOT A MAFIA! Never mind the fact that Tsuna is only in middle school and is totally not cut out for being the boss of a mafia family. Reborn just keeps insisting that Tsuna gather people to become part of his new "Family" and ends up inadvertently recruiting several of his school mates. There's Hayato Gokudera who's all deredere on Tsuna but tsuntsun with everyone else, Takeshi Yamamamoto the kind hearted star of the school baseball team, Ryohei Sasagawa the EXTREME head of the Boxing Club, Kyoya Hibari the head of the Disciplinary Committee who WILL..."bite [you] to death" for even the slightest offense against him and others including Lambo a five year old from another mafia family who keeps an assortment of strange things in his afro, and the mysterious Mukuro Rokudo and his associate Chrome Dokuro who seem to have a time share using Chrome's body. Comedy and action ensue.

Okay, so getting to all that technical shit about the series, both the anime and the manga look...pretty good. I personally prefer the look of the anime though for the simple reason that it makes the characters look a bit more mature in my opinion. Everyone in the manga is drawn with that whole bishonen/bishojo look to them and personally while their anime counterparts look just as good, I think that they loose some of the...I'm not sure but they loose something and look just a little bit better. Speaking for the anime though, lets get onto the music. It's...all decent in terms of BGM. A touch repetitive, what anime isn't in their selection of BGM but it definitely doesn't hinder anything. For the voice acting, it's top notch! Reborn is the only series I really really know of to have concerts specially put on by the seiyuu who dress up like their characters and sing openings, endings and image songs and for some of them they look JUST LIKE THEIR CHARACTERS! IT'S NOT EVEN FUNNY! As far as those vocal pieces go the notable standout among everything the series has to offer is the group known as Cherryblossom who perform a number of the shows openings and endings including Dive to World, Cycle, Sakura Rock and my personal favorite of theirs Yume no Manual.

So...here comes the part of the review where I get tempted to split it into multiple parts because while Reborn is a personal favorite series of mine, it's by no means the best series I've ever watched. It's really pretty average shonen when you think about it and the only thing that makes it stand out from the crowd is the "mafia" twist it has and while there are a lot of good things about it, there are a lot of not so great things about it too. So here's what I'll do. I'll make this a 3 parter. This will be the first part where its' pretty much just the straight basic review of the series and my brief opinions on it. Then I'll do another post in which I go over the biggest problems the series has and another post going over the best things about it.

So as for my thoughts on the series, I think that Reborn had a lot of work and effort into it and I personally really like that. The series, like most other shonen series, tires it's hand at comedy and action and most times it works really well while other times...not so much. There are times where a funny moment will fail miserably and times where the action seems completely pointless but that's just the kind of over the top series that Reborn is. In fact, that's a good way to describe Reborn. It's over the top. Not anywhere near as over the top as Gurren Lagann but it's pretty up there. The characters, as we'll get into later, are probably the real strength of the series. From their designs to their personalities, they're all...unique in their own way from the obnoxious Lambo to the eccentric Haru to the completely unpredictable Reborn himself. That's not to say that they're all useful as we'll also get into later on but they're very good characters in my opinion. The plot lines are also standard shonen albeit with a mafia twist to them which is kind of...refreshing in a way. It'd be a bit more effective if the viewer actually LEARNED something about how the real mafia worked but its' fiction so why should we expect it to resemble reality in any way.

So...those are my basic thoughts on Reborn. Overall, I find it decently well done, but not a masterpiece and could've definitely have been improved. The following blog posts will primarally focus on the Reborn anime as opposed to the manga and this is because I haven't read all the manga. I've watched all the anime and can talk about that much better! So...see y'all later! DaWaRou~!