Review: D.N.Angel Anime

This anime was recommended to me by a personal friend of mine who has more experience with anime then I do, which I can freely admit and therefore I do take his word seriously.  Through watching the series, I was entertained when it came to some things, but bored when it came to others.  So, after looking into this recommendation and completing the series, here is my review of D.N.Angel.




So, the series starts out with a normal teenage boy named Daisuke Niwa.  Like most teenagers going through puberty, he has a crush on a, *gasp*, girl from school.  This girl's name is Risa Harada.  She is the more popular person in school, and has a standing friendship to Niwa and unfortunately for him, wants to be just friends. The setting from my guess actually takes place in a European setting, and by my hypothesis, is somewhere in France.  So, Niwa goes and writes Risa a love letter explaining that he wants to date her and before he can deliver it, she states that she only sees them as just friends even without him giving her the note. So, Niwa goes home crushed by this fact and yet his mother after he gets home encourages him not to give up.

Dark the Phantom Thief

Soon afterwards, Niwa suddenly changes and his hair gets longer and turns a dark purple. It is soon explained afterward that Niwa is the descendant of a legendary phantom thief called Dark, who is sort of an angel with black wings, and every male after turning 14 has the ability to change into Dark and Dark uses the body of the person to go and steal things, which is odd because every time he steals something, they send an advance warning to the police and the media telling them that he is going to steal whatever he is told to steal this time.

What is explained also is how this happens. Apparently, Niwa has some genes that when he looks at the person or a picture of the person that he is in love with, he changes into Dark.  When the person he is in love with admits their love to him, then he wont change into Dark anymore.   Yes, I know that this seems kind of sappy, but like I said, I'm doing this for the friend that recommended it! I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt.

Through the first few episodes, the action is pretty intense, mainly for the times when Dark is stealing something.  Also at times, they do add some comedic instances in there, mainly making fun of Niwa's love life, family life, and Niwa arguing with Dark over small little things. As the series goes on though, it seems to go in more of a direction of every episode being a separate filler for the show.  Therefore, the series did get slightly boring after a while and made me want to finish it quicker than I thought I would.

Eventually, Niwa figures out that he doesn't actually love Risa and instead ends up loving someone else and they get together and eventually Dark disappears.  The thing also is that Niwa actually doesn't even learn really anything from this whole thing and it just seems to be high school relationship drama only with an added twist of the supernatural thrown into it. Like i said too, it does drag on slightly in the middle of the series and doesn't really even explain a lot as to why he is stealing these things, and since all the things he steals have some sort of power to them, the most common being sucking out people's souls, but never really explaining his own power. 

Well, there you have it folks, my review of D.N.Angel is finished.  Though the plot line was sort of good, there are many holes in it and most episodes don't really have anything to do with the plot at all and, true, there are some amusing sections in this anime, such as Niwa's mother setting traps all over the house in order to keep Niwa trained for stealing things, it's mostly a romantic based series, which I am not the hugest fan of.  Other people may say I'm wrong but they are not my favorite.  So, after watching this series, I have come to the point where I can say that this review is good in some points, but completely lacks in others. Overall this should get a 6.1/10. Total episodes: 26. The series is better in the original Japanese with English subtitles so if you would like to watch it for yourself, then I suggest watching it on nwanime.com.