Saturday 5 April 2014

Riddle Story of Devil - Episode 1

Tokaku Azuma is a brilliant assassin, which makes her the perfect choice for a mission at Myoujou Academy, a boarding school with no shortage of connections to the rich and influential... or it is just her terrible judgement that has made her the ideal choice for the mission in question?

Regardless, Azuma finds herself taking a place in this Academy's so-called Black Class, a class filled with assassins with various motivations, all of whom are after a single target - a target that very obviously seems to be one Haru Ichinose, as the only cheerful and relatively normal girl in the midst of a growing numbers of weirdos and misfits.


Finding herself assigned to room with Haru, who seems quite content to follow her around anywhere and everywhere, Azuma seems perfectly placed to take the lead in whatever instructions are passed her way - for now though, her job is merely to observe, while it seems that the other girls are more than happy to spend their time antagonising both Tokaku and one another.  While Azuma is beset by nightmares and unpleasant memories, it seems that Haru also has some dark moments in her past - is what we're seeing the true Ichinose, and what's with the knife wounds around her legs?

For some reason I'm always a sucker for shows filled with violent and frankly bonkers characters (a la Mirai Nikki), and Akuma no Riddle's opener certainly doesn't disappoint on that front - everyone is clearly a little bit mental and ready to snap and start meting out violence and every opportunity, and the detached Azuma and energetically cheerful Haru work quite nicely as foils to all of that.  If anything, this first episode lays on the craziness a bit thick from some of its characters to the point of making them a little too cartoonish, but given that I'm not expecting a huge amount from this show other than (hopefully) some entertaining action and sharp little twists and turns I can let that go for now.  This clearly isn't going to be the kind of show that people will rave about, but I am at least curious to see where it's leading, and hopefully it makes a suitably good use of the elements it's assembled moving forward.

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