I was going to review this anime in anidb.net but I don't want to comply with their guidelines. I just want to have out this frustration that it put into me.
I think that what most saddens me is the potential that this had and that was thrown overboard. I saw the first 9 episodes in a row. I was amazed and gloating in anticipation.
Hold your horses.
It's well and dandy that they chose to narrate this through Albert, and not the Count. That left more opportunities to enrich the Count's mystery. However, there is a gradually increasing feeling that something with the Count depiction isn't right. And indeed isn't right. We are supposed to like him, at least if we must understand the pains Albert takes to "redeem" or "save" him. We get this very clearly in the book: the Count is capable of great compassion, generosity, and he's appalled at the collateral damage of some of his vengeful acts. The struggle can be felt, and the final fate of the Count is, amongst several possible, perfectly fitting.
Here the plot takes us into a totally unnecesary relight of the Mondego character once it was almost disposed with. Mondego goes in minutes from crazy maniac to repentant father. In the end, he doesn't get neither the punishment he deserves (not by law, but by all the people that he deceived) nor a decent final stand-off.
But the Count... the Count is wasted nonsensically and acts even more incongruously. One could think he's struggling between compassion and revenge, between hate and love, ... but if this is the intention, this isn't what's depicted. Minutes before his end, he could have been master of his destiny, but ultimately he is overwhelmed by the Gankutsuou first, Albert (!!!) embrace (if not kiss) next, his pitiful attempts at killing when again human then, and finally death.
Talk about anticlimatic.
We are then "subtly" bombarded with the apparent similarity between the young trio and the previous generation one. Nice and dandy if it weren't for the detail that in the former, one man is secretly in love with the other to the point of giving his life, while in the latter the conniving bitch by any measure kills his "friend" and steals his woman. Yeah, exactly the same, fond, memories. That's enough reason to let die the condemned and let live (if even he's to coward to do so) the scum-friend. (And, since I mentioned it, since when failing to show at a duel is simply forgotten?)
Yes, I think that duel is the point where things go decidedly south. In the book this is the point where Albert has to forcibly mature, and the Count reluctantly knows it has to be done, even if in the end is for the best. Here he goes in as the murderer zombie he is, kills the wrong rival, forgives the missing one, and we are left wondering why anyone loves him).
I could go on on other characters' rationality and plot holes the size of the titanic (how does Albert board the fscking bombing cruiser? hello?), but these are secondary to the depiction of the Count. We have to accept at face value that he's worth rooting for (as in the book), but he's not (in the anime). Which in itself is a cognitive dissonance, even more so for anyone who has read the original. In the end, the last few chapters feel like random happenings, but the worst is that nothing forced them taking that route.
/Rant.
