Spoilers

This is my first review on anilist so bear with me.

Baccano! Is adored and praised by fans who somehow see past the fact that the show isn't coherent in any way! The first episode is an amalgamation of nothingness, as it starts off with two narrators who would seem to be protagonists, but are actually the ones introducing the cast of MCs. Then, the real MCs are thankfully reintroduced in the next episode’s opening. A train departs from a station somewhere and somehow the entire cast is on that train (unexplained) and a monster also happens to be there. Oh, and you can’t possibly forget the handful of side characters on a boat in the 1700s (the show is set in the 1930s so there is also some sort of unexplained method of time travel involved) who yearn for an immortality elixir for seemingly no explicable reason conveyed in the show. Somehow this all ties into a mafia turf war, and the only characters who make any sense are Isaac and Miria, a pair of crazy but lovable train robbers.

My thoughts:

The best parts about this show are its OP, final episode, Isaac and Miria. The rest feels like somebody had a cool idea and botched the delivery as the story makes pretty damn close to zero sense and the gimmick where the show repeats the same scene a bunch of times just confuses it more. If you are gonna do a ensemble cast there's a specific way to do it where each main character gets enough screen time so the viewer gets to understand and connect with each character. The issue here lies with all of baccano's unnecessary time skips and achronology as well as the only thirteen episode length, which causes the story to feel so compressed that it becomes the most jumbled story which attempts to go for something amazing and flops. And don't even get me started on the first episode, where they tried to introduce the abundant cast of characters in 25 minutes but in reality just presented a bunch of random, unrelated situations that barely get connected during the story. It boggles my mind how the OP for the show introduces the characters more successfully than the first episode.

My most positive thought about the plot and its punch line would be concerning the final episode. I finally started to make sense of some sort of plot by the end, although at that point in the show it was definitely a bit too late for it to make any huge impact in my rating of baccano! as a whole.

ratings:

story: 5 (one of the least coherent stories I've ever seen - not lower or higher than a 5 because while the first 12 episodes were pretty incomprehensible the final episode made a lot of sense with how they showed the train station scene from episode 1 or 2 and I actually surprisingly enjoyed it)

characters: 6 (saved by Isaac and Miria)

visuals: 7 (generally no complaints except character designs were all kinda generic and similar)

audio: 8 (great jazz op and pretty good ed)

enjoyment: 5

thanks so much for reading!