“And is fairness really something you’ve come to expect from your life? I wouldn’t think so…why should things be different now?” -Decim of the Quindecim

Now I should preface right from the start with this one, that if you haven’t already seen this show (which you absolutely should) you may want to watch at least the short film Death Billiards or “Death Pool” before you read this review. It’s basically the pilot episode of the show which came out way before it got turned into a full series. It’s one of the best short films I’ve ever seen with gorgeous yet quite graphic animation, great character designs, fantastic lighting and colours, great choreography and a chilling yet classy atmosphere, so you should definitely check that out first. It pretty much shows you exactly what you’re in for if you decide to continue on with the full series.

Now onto the full review:

Working as judge is undoubtedly a difficult task, you must remain impartial and work with the evidence presented before you whilst deciding the fate of people whose true nature is often clouded in mystery. Death Parade however does not deal with normal judges, it deals with judges of the soul, arbiters between heaven and hell as they like to put it. And when it comes to judgement of the soul it is not simply about crimes and misdeads commited in life, rather it’s about the darkness of the soul itself, how to expose that darkness, and how to judge the person accordingly. But just how would anyone go about such judgement?

In Death Parade we are introduced to the Quindecim, one of many “courtrooms” of the afterlife. Ironically this place takes the form of a bar, a place where people generally come to forget, yet in this context they are sent here to do the complete opposite.

You see people who enter this bar do not remember exactly how they got there, they simply arrive through an elevator and are met with unfamiliar surroundings. The people who arrive here all have one thing in common though, they do not arrive alone. There are two elevator doors at Quindecim’s entrance, and all guests arrive in pairs.

They are quickly welcomed by Quindecim’s bartender; Decim. None of the two guests have any recollection of how they got there, and in their confusion they may take a seat by the bar to perhaps have a drink or to inquire about their current situation.

They are not simply sent there to relax however, as Decim quickly explains to them that in order to leave this place they will have to play a game decided upon by roulette. Moreover the stakes of the game are very high, their lives in fact, and to top it off they cannot leave Quindecim until the game is completed.

Most guests will of course try to leave the bar at this point, only to find that there is no exit. Returning to the counter they demand answers as to their situation, only to hear once more that all they need to do in order to leave is to play the game.

If they are to refuse this offer however they are promptly presented with a room of dangling bodies behind the counter, indicating that if they do not play the game they will be killed.

This threat is of course a ruse, as the guests are already dead, they just don’t know it yet. You see as they arrive at the Quindecim they have already passed on, they have both already died, however they don’t remember dying as the shock of death has greatly affected their memory. Additionally all pairs who arrive here are people who passed on at the same time, seeing as their judgement requires at least two people.

As previously mentioned this judgement is carried out by games chosen through roulette, where both contestants have to compete against eachother in whatever game is chosen with their lives on the line. These games consist of everything from billiards to arcade games, each with their own special quirks like causing physical pain upon the oppossing player for points scored, or just straight up being rigged.

These games are not necessarily designed to be fair, as that is not the point. As an arbiter Decim actually receives all the contestant’s memories right before they arrive, so he already knows their complete life story, including all their transgressions and all their kindness. Actions commited in life however are not what Decim is looking for, as what arbiters exist to do is to see what the contestants are capable of under the right curcimstances, and by extension their souls.

These matches are designed for one specific purpose; to reveal the true darkness of the contestants through extreme conditions and judge their souls accordingly. Based on their actions they will ultimately be sentenced to either heaven or hell, at least that’s the abridged version. More specifically they will either be reincarnated or sent to the void where their souls will fall forever into darkness.

Of course the players assume that if they were to lose the game they will simply die, as they are unaware that they are already dead, on top of that they’re not all equally skilled in the games selected. The contestants may also be of different age groups and have differing life stories, with one of them having more to lose than the other, or they may even know each other, with the very first episode involving a couple of newlyweds. Therefore, depending on how they interpret the situation they will react in different ways.

Now these death games are interesting enough by themselves, but as I said before, the guests are here to remember, and what they’re here to remember are their own lives. These games can be excruciating, frustrating, downright heartbreaking experiences for the contestants, and during the course of a game their life stories are laid out before us as the players are forced by extreme conditions to remember the last days of their life, and ultimately how they got to the Quindecim in the first place.

In fact seeing these flashbacks and slowly learning these character’s individual stories is so interesting that almost every episode containing them feel like their own individual short films made just to tell that specific story, just like the original pilot episode was.

They’ll remember both the best and worst aspects of themselves and maybe even about their opponent if they knew them in life. They’ll remember what killed them, who killed them, why they killed themselves, the life they led and if it was a fulfilling one. This can all create an excruciating display of emotions unraveling before us as the players realize who they are as people, and what they would do to survive this death game that they don’t even know is a ruse in the first place. And all of this is represented through intensly detailed and painfully realistic animation, brimming with emotions and tragedy, sometimes heightened even further by the brilliant soundtrack of the series.

Because of all this, Death Parade may seem like a rather dark and depressing series, or maybe even something mildly akin to the Saw movies, however that is not really the case. This show may present itself as such in some aspects, but the real beauty of this series comes not from it being cynical of life, but rather in how it celebrates life, along with our inevitable mortality.

BTW, this is probably a point in the review where, if you’ve gained enough interest in the show by now to watch it, you may want to stop reading right here if you want to avoid any significant spoilers. If you have already seen the show however, or want to keep on reading after you’ve seen it, then by all means continue doing so as this is the more interesting part of the review.

You see despite being an arbiter in the land of the dead, Decim has himself never experienced death, or life for that matter, none of the arbiters have. He has however always had a fascination with humans and wish to understand them, in addition he has developed a respect for people who have lived fulfilling lives.

So much so in fact that he keeps mannequins around in his bar representing people he once judged, in an effort to somehow preserve their memory as the rest of the world inevitably forgets them completely. This also ties in to his supernatural ability of manipulating puppet strings with his mind, as he is very much so a puppet master.

While taking on the appearance of humans though, arbiters are not human themselves, they are simply life-given dummies who exist for the purpose of judging souls, and as such they lack human emotions. This is done to make them impartial and to not judge based on emotions, but rather based solely on how they observe the contestants. Basically it removes the human aspect from judging, which is also where the central themes of the series come into play.

At least, that’s the rule. Rules are made to be broken however, in this case by Nona (best girl), the manager of the arbiter system. She has come to the conclusion that it might be better with different ways of judging, and as such has done something quite unorthodox that she keeps hidden from her superiors.

Nona has created an arbiter with human emotions, who happens to be none other than Decim, though he himself is not aware of this. Interesting considering how Decim is by far the most deadpanned of all the arbiters, despite being the only one you’d expect to display feelings in the first place. Instead the other arbiters are the ones acting human with their expressions and actions.

This is really just yet another of the aspects that make Death Parade such a great show. Seeing as Decim never lived a fulfilled life himself, no life at all in fact, he never learned to show emotions the way real humans would, in contrast with the other arbiters who were seemingly implanted with strong artificial personalities during their creation. It really makes you think about just what makes us human, and how emotions shape us. It’s simply another reason for why Decim is one of my favourite fictional characters.

His situation changes however when we are introduced to Chiyuki, a woman who arrives at the Quindecim remembering her death.

Seeing this error in their system, Nona wants to simply erase Chiyuki’s memory of death and start her judgement anew, though proper this time. Decim on the other hand asks for permission to instead prolong her judgement, as unlike the other arbiters he finds this new guest fascinating. He therefore requests permission to keep her around as his assistant aiding him in judgements.

Nona accepts this request out of curiosity, but before that can happen she has to make Chiyuki into a proper arbiter. She therefore wipes her memory and convinces her that she is an arbiter of souls just like the others. Her memory is still there though, it’s simply repressed.

She is swiftly put to work at the Quindecim acting as an assistant bartender to Decim, though as a human her reactions to all this differ considerably from those of the other arbiters.

Unlike normal arbiters, Chiyuki doesn’t look at their signature death games as simply a means to an end. As a human herself she understands people differently from the view of other arbiters, and therefore brings a new element to the judgements; emotion. And in doing so she also elicits a change within Decim.

Now if this was any other show, Chiyuki would perhaps just be another shallow, goodie goodie character. In other words the character who comes to this dark and depressing world, only to show the arbiters a better way of dealing with humans, making everything hunky-dory and then everyone lives happily ever after.

Instead however, Chiyuki is not as emotionally charged most of the time as you might expect, on the contrary she is pretty accepting of her new world. And rather than immediately standing up to Decim and telling him he’s a bad person for doing what he does, she instead goes along with it for the most part, unless he’s way out of line.

But yeah, what I said about the arbiters having removed the human aspect from judging?That human aspect is exactly what Chiyuki introduces to Decim, the aspect of fullblown human emotion and understanding, as well as the experience of having lived.

And what she does with this is bring up a very valid point of the series; the fact that humans are neither as simple, nor as complex as arbiters treat them. And by leaving out the human factor entirely, the arbital system is fundamentally flawed because of it, something which the other arbiters are practically incapable of understanding aside from Decim.

Through Chiyuki’s eyes, these games may not only be revealing the contestants true darkness, they may also be creating it in the first place. And by judging people solely based on malice concocted by the arbiters themselves, the system isn’t respecting all the other parts of what makes us human, be them good or bad.

She’s not a character who’s simply there to exemplify how it’s wrong to judge people the way arbiters do, nor does she think that way herself. However as a human she inherently has a better understanding of other humans compared to arbiters, of how they feel, of how they think, of the life they might have led and how that shaped them as a person.

This in turn is exactly what Decim has been so curious about all his time of being an arbiter, despite him fully realizing it or not; the fact that he doesn’t really understand humans, and why he was the only arbiter with a strong desire to understand the people he judged. This has, of course, always been because of his own emotions, the feelings he never knew he had, and when Chiyuki is there to help him understand that, he finally starts showing them.

It’s a wonderful character arc to witness, though perhaps just as interesting is the fact that despite this completely new viewpoint Decim never completely changes as a character, he simply learns from it, nor does Chiyuki end up having a substantial impact on the arbiter system in the end.

If I was to describe this show I would probably describe it as, all in all, an ultimately feel good show, despite the initially misleading title. Though at the same time it never strays far away from hard-hitting and depressing topics. Life is a rollercoaster indeed, it has its ups and it has its downs, though ultimately there is worth to be found in it, even beauty if you’re willing to look for it.

Interestingly, not everyone who arrives at the Quindecim has a bad time there, in fact as early as in the pilot episode “Death Billiards” we meet an old man who has clearly lived a long and fulfilled life. He has experienced every aspect of it, and frankly, seems content with his life, and happy that he lived it. So much so that a single game of billiards and a roughly imitated match of kendo makes him reflect on his life with great satisfaction and even joy, despite how violent it all turns out to get. It’s all to show how we all have something to gain out of life, something we strive for, something we’re passionate for, someone who cares for us, whatever brings your life meaning really, and frankly that’s worth fighting for.

But on the other side of that same coin we have a younger man who’s clearly not okay with death and wanted desperately too keep on living, though was never granted that chance and died at an early age. His life was certainly different from that of the old man, but honestly not by much when you get down to it, he simply made different life choices which ultimately ended up costing him his life, despite the fact that he deeply regretted them.

Life’s not all pretty, and this show is not all hammy, it shows that despite even your best intentions or regrettable mistakes you may still end up in purgatory before you know it.

It shows that despite how we like to apply our own knowledge of the world on others, and how we like to judge them based on our own experience, their lives are most likely completely different from ours. They have their own experiences, their own circumstances, their own problems that we might know nothing about. And if someone were to choose the easy way out because of those experiences, then that may not be a good thing, but we should still respect others enough to understand or perhaps learn of their problems, and not pass judgement based solely on our own biased terms.

Actually some of my favourite moments of the series are when the judgements end, and the contestants are sent either for reincarnation or to the void. As the elevator doors close we fully understand who they are as people and how the game affected them, we’ve seen their stories and can judge for ourselves if we approve of their choices or not, but in the end we get it, and that’s really what the show sets out to do in the first place.

I mean this show is really quite beautiful in my opinion, and I feel it’s a shame how many people dismissed it as pretentious or overrated as it aired. Mainly seeing as it came out during a winter anime season where almost everything else sucked in comparison, like it wasn’t really that good, it was just decent compared to everything else at the time, which I obviously don’t agree with whatsoever.

I myself kept up with the show as it was airing, and I thought it was pretty solid at the time. Though especially now that I finally rewatched it I really found a big appreciation for the series, and if you didn’t care much for it as it initially aired then I highly recommend giving it another go.

This also brings me to another point I wanted to make, that if this is the kind of show that people count as overrated or perhaps dismiss completely, regardless of what they personally think of the series, then perhaps they have too high standards when it comes to anime, which believe it or not are possible to have. What I’m really saying here is that shows like Death Parade may just deserve a bit more recognition than they are given, and that if you really want the anime industry to improve then these are the kinds of shows you should be supporting in the first place.

If we are to simply ignore shows like Death Parade then where does that leave us? Well it leaves us with less shows like this one, meaning less original shows, less shows trying new ideas, less shows with this amount of class, less shows actually attempting to be art in some fashion.

I mean I’m not one of those people who think that anime is in a really bad place and needs to be saved or whatever, but that’s largely because of the fact that among the wast ocean of cheap pandering shows we also have shows like Death Parade, shows which are actually trying to be something unique and interesting, to really provide a vision. That’s an ideal that deserves support, and people seem to ignore that fact far too often.

All that said, Death Parade still doesn’t completely avoid indulging in the general silliness of most anime, with the intro song of the show being a super catchy and up-beat number performed by the japanese rock band Bradio, wherein the characters of Death Parade are performing to the music all hunky-dory. Easily one of the most misleading anime openings out there, though it still shows hints of the more serious themes of the show if you read between the lines. It’s easily one of my favourite anime openings of all time.

We also of course have episode 6, which, while not the best episode ever, at least serves to alleviate the darker feel of the show at least a little bit before the heavier episodes of the show start. Even it though isn’t completely devoid of seriousness and does help lead into one of the darker moments of the show in episode 11.

Also I just have to talk about Quindecim itself and how utterly gorgous it looks. If you’re going to have your entire show take place in almost exclusively a single location the entire time, then that one location better be the best one location you’ve ever laid eyes on. And Death Parade certainly delivers with one of the most beautiful and memorable settings in all of anime; the Quindecim, complete with gorgeous lighting and colours all over the place.

In conclusion; Death Parade is a pretty great show and you should probably watch it…………the English dub is great too.

REVIEW END