Anime: Claymore

A lost then found then lost girl seeks vengeance for the second loss. Except you don't really know that until about half way through and it turns out to be a far less interesting plot than the characters and events up until that point had hinted it could be. In the beginning there are Claymores, and they're individuals and unique, and their fights and abilities are novel and beautifully animated. In the background is a slowly brewing conflict arising from the one-sided relationship between the Claymore's and the Organization and it is intriguing. Then all of that takes a back seat to the classic quest for power where will and desire lead to an ever blossoming fountain of previously unknown and poorly explained abilities that exceed anything believable. Massive battles take place where the balance of powers that had been established get ignored, limits are surpassed, a decision must be made, a climax is reached, and it ends. None of the good stuff is resolved and neither is any of the bad stuff, everyone wanders off in a "we'll see you next season" sort of way and poof. Oh, and there's an incredibly obnoxious little boy with serious abandonment issues and delusions of grandeur who whines periodically when something sad happens that doesn't fit his bizarre view of how the world really ought to work.

The first 11 episodes are great, the next 6 are good, it slowly devolves throughout the next 7 before the last 2 ridiculous episodes. It's entertaining and well animated but my major gripe is it could have been so much more.

Claymore is all about monsters and girls with swords, literally. While this premise may sound like the typical samurai-girl stuff or perhaps a rip-off of Blood+, what you're presented here is a completely different beast in many aspects. The girls with swords may be cute blondies, but they lack the sexual appeal common to school teenagers. The monsters are more horrific and powerful, providing some great moments of tension and never really allowing you to predict the outcome of a single combat. Whenever monsters and claymores (the girls of swords) clashes, you can expect some very nice moments filled with surprises and smart turns of events.

The show only had the bad luck of being released together with a bunch of other quality shows. You had many others with the same or greater quality released in 2007 and they certainly put Claymore in the background, not exactly because they were better, but because Claymore is not a flashy show filled with elements that can be used to lure teenagers, create brand of toys, TV merchandise, etc.

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Art & Animation
Claymore art style is very unique. I don't remind watching a similar show, perhaps with bits of similarities to Death Note and other Madhouse works, but still quite different, and that is remarkable. While the art is unique, it does not mean it's exactly gorgeous. The monsters are certainly superbly detailed and varied, with some mixes of fantastic and horror creatures that do not evoke fear, but are enough to show how strong and powerful they are. The humans, however, suffer from inconsistency and some weird characterization, they have bodies that sometimes feel more like barbie dolls instead of the typical japanese style and at other times look far more mature than the standard line. Regardless of the art style, the animation is good enough to deliver some awesome fights and the darker painting allow for a more serious and adult setting to be developed.

Sound
Not much to say in sound direction. Claymore's opening is very fitting and succeed in creating the necessary atmosphere for what is to come, the voice acting is mature and good, and the background music never present itself as an issue. Overall Claymore offers a very solid sound direction that never compromise the whole experience, but is somewhat lacking of helping to rise the show to higher grounds.

Story
Claymore's tale is about Claire, a member of the organization that hunts down the horrifying youma that scares villages and kill random citizens for their own bloodlust. She is defined as being the weakest Claymore of all as far as their internal rank applies, and suffers some kind of bully from her co-workers as she joins groups to hunt youmas. They don't know, however, that she started out as a normal girl protected by one of the strongest Claymores that ever existed.

During one travel though, Claire meets a boy named Raki and slowly starts to see the truth in the world. She learns that the biggest foes Claymores must face are not the youma out there, but themselves. Secrets about the past Claymores, mad experiments, betrayals, suicide missions, and many other events start to unfold as Claire struggles to look for her human side when near Raki or to her monster side when facing youma.

1. Good but Unexplored Setting
   Regardless of being a show with monsters, girls, and swords, Claymore delivers a superb piece of setting. It initially starts as some nameless land with nameless cities and countries that is only divided in regions, but as the secrets are exposed it grows more complex and enjoyable. We have multiple overpowerful beings ruling the regions, other minor characters with important roles, a dark origin surrounded by mystery, many past Claymores with interesting backgrounds and stories, etc. The anime, however, never digs too far in the setting as the manga, but that is an issue well covered by a good narrative filled with tense moments where the next turn of events is always a gory and different one.
   
   Ranking System is definitely nice for shounens
   Claymore's plot move in a very interesting way. It mixes bits of a sports show, giving ranks to the Claymores, labeling the top ones as truly strong but always making you wonder what exactly are her powers or who exactly are they. It also delivers a good set of epic powerful monsters and a story between them and the Claymores, making for some very nice scenes and outcomes whenever they clash.
   
   Nice Pace, but rushed alternative ending
   This constant presentation of Claymores, youmas, and other creatures of the setting allows for a superb pace and is almost sure to constantly grab your attention. While the plot is not exactly extraordinary or complex, it's good enough considering the genre. The greatest issue here is the fact that the end is different from the manga, somehow rushed and leaving many plot holes open, especially because the anime does not ommit the many powerful beings and other Claymores, making you wish to know more about them, but never doing so. Reading the manga makes everything better, but the anime alone suffers a lot from this lack of a true ending.
   

Character
Claymores are youma-infused women gifted with monstrous strengths and a few other unique powers. They are used to hunt youmas in the land whenever requested and sometimes act in groups to hunt bigger and tougher youmas. All the Claymores are the same, with backgrounds of misery or death, almost always involving a youma killing her parents or so.

1. Fanservice gal, but nice at least
   Claire's a bit different from they as it's presented in the first episodes. She becomes in fact a very good character on her own, never suffering from much of the typical protagonist problems. She has wits and courage but lacks power as usual, and because of that she is aided by other Claymores and characters most of the time, but she grabs other motivations as the show progresses and events occur. Ultimately she learns to use her own tricks to her favor, and although she gets god-powerful by the end to rush the series ending, her overall progression is far more believable than what you typically find in shounens where the next super-power unlocks whenever they face a stronger foe.
   
   Stupid monsters, nice villains, limited humans, lack of development
   The regular monsters are mostly mindless beasts, much like evil thugs with a desire for human parts, but the powerful ones are truly evil bastards who love torture and have little of their original personalities. They are great villains and could certainly be more used in the show besides the combats where they appear. Humans, however, are very limited here, never showing much progress and acting in ways that would better serve the typical commoners of medieval fantasy and not villagers of a world haunted by uber-power beings. Raki, in particular, is a very annoying piece of sh*t that never evolve in his resolve. What Claymore really suffers in its cast is that most of the time they are fighting and even though some are great characters, they get little time to show that and evolve their personalities.
   

Value
Claymore is different. You're unlikely to see similar shows with the same use of gore, monsters, tensions, desperation, etc. Berserk sometime falls in this category, but Claymore focus more on fights and monsters than war and intrigues. The cast is not exactly superb, but the small setting created by the show proves to be a very good one when the secrets are revealed, especially if you dig into the manga to catch up with more details in the part after the "ending" of the anime. Simply because Claymore is such a different and mature show, it's easy to watch it again and is hard to forget for those who experienced it fully.

Enjoyment
Claymore's fights are awesome. The tense moments are always there and the surprising turns of events never fail. Because of that Claymore can grab you and keep you watching episode after episode, wishing to uncover more about the character's pasts, to know more about the top-ranked Claymores, the super-powerful monsters, and so on. This constant lure to uncover more and more makes Claymore a show that lasts for a while after you watch it. The true only killing element here is the fact that half of the series you'll be watching a single scene (heads rolling...) repeat over and over, sometimes taking away some of the tension built. Those looking for great fights in a more mature scenario will certainly love Claymore, but if you expect ecchiness with the girls, comedy, or anything light hearted, get away because Claymore shows absolutely nothing of the sorts.

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Comments
If you liked Berserk because of its darker setting and the way it portraited monsters, you may truly like Claymore. While most of the show is more about fights and less about political intrigue, it grabbed my attention and got a spot as one of my greatly cherished anime. It's hard to find series with this kind of setting. Dark Fantasy is perhaps the rarest genre animes take, and the ones that try to recreated similar scenarios always fails because the typical japanese art is too "cute" to deliver the necessary tension and despair that is required or because they end up with some cheesy comedy or noisy characters. The unique art style and the lack of sexualization in its characters help Claymore in that, joined with the mixed super-power fights makes it a more refreshing experience and a show that most people should watch.

For many years Claymore was promoted as the second Berserk, because it was dark fantasy and we didn’t have much of that back when it was made. The similarities are surface level at best, since down to it Claymore is like Berserk, but with more boobs and less plot. It hardly does much with its potential and it’s average at best.

The art was very good as far as aesthetics go. High on detail with lots of filters and dark palette colors to transmit the feeling of a grim world overrun with dread and death. That aside, character designs were unappealing, with weird faces and very similar body types. I had a hard time telling apart the Claymores since they all looked and acted the same. Also common Yoma were drawn too simplistic and human-like and were closer to painted bandits with fangs, which was hardly making them scary.

The fight scenes were mostly about the gore than the action choreography, so it wasn’t exciting even back when it was made. Now it’s just plain and boring to look at. It’s extra insulting when you know it was animated by Madhouse, which back then was the king of anime studios. You would at least expect more fluent fighting scenes or creepier monster voices, but nah, despite the popularity of the manga it was based on, they did a rushjob. Most battles didn’t last much and ended in a dull way. There was very little actual animation to the fights as most slashes were nothing but frozen pictures with a silver line that was substituting motion. This was usually followed by excessive amounts of blood, which as cool as they may have been if you were not accustomed to the glorious goreporns of the 80s, they were not rewarding you for the boring build up and the disappointing finishing move.

Claymore’s strong point was not its story, which was simple, linear, and just like it happened with the first Full Metal Alchemist, not even a faithful adaptation, since it followed a small part of the manga and then changed the ending it in a way that made a continuation impossible. The premise is about fighting fire with fire and thus the monsters that plague humanity in this series are to be dealt by humans possessing monster abilities. It could have been an exploration around that and how you can keep your humanity despite having to act like a monster, but you hardly get much of that. This is no Parasyte or Devilman Crybaby, or even Tokyo Ghoul. The plot can also be easily divided into short arcs with their own set of monsters, which don’t explore the theme or the setting, as much as they offer some fairly basic characterization.

The characters are the selling point, since the monster hunters are a bunch of emotionless super waifus whose worst enemy ends up being their own selves, as they slowly turn to Yoma. We mostly see that through Claire, the main heroine, who moves from a heatless killing machine to a… heatless killing machine than has a will of her own and doesn’t go around killing stuff just because she was ordered to do it. And this is done through her interactions with Raki, an obnoxious idiot who is supposed to be a pacifist and what keeps Claire connected with her humanity, but comes off as a spineless idiot who is nagging, making unrealistic remarks, standing in the way, and generally causing more trouble than helps out. Nobody likes Raki; he’s a party pooper. As for the adversaries, the Yoma, they can hardly be called characters, since to the most part they are just mooks that exist to be killed as generic mini bosses. You will never get something to care about them, much less find out where they come from. They don’t even feel like monsters most of the time, since they come off as cosplaying cannibals with motivations that don’t go beyond ‘kill humans’.

I also didn’t like the dialogues, as they are very shonen for the subject matter they are dealing with. They infodump a lot, even during a fight, when they have no reason to say all that shit. All the Claymores want, is to kill Yoma, and by talking needlessly about what they plan to do, they give them a lot of information which can be used against them. And the Yoma talk like hillbillies without some voice alteration for making them sound like the scary monsters they are supposed to be. Also, Raki’s moral speeches are unbearable, as he keeps saying the most out of place things all the time. He is not the voice of reason or the good angel sitting on the right side of the brutal Claymores. He’s completely detached from the reality of the world he is living in, and thus quickly becomes a major mood-killer.

So, is there any value in this anime? Aside from nostalgia possibly, no there isn’t. You can easily find shows that do everything better, and don’t have Raki in them. The popularity of the anime was based on a lot of people who were easily impressed by violence and amoral characters, something which is nothing special and keeps repeating to this day every time an edgy anime comes out.

Claymore attempts to be something like a new Berserk; most of it is derived from it and other similar works and there's very little originality throughout. It's overall quite entertaining if your expectations aren't very high, but it's also riddled with obvious flaws.

Animation

Mostly pleasing and nicely detailed throughout the show, the animation tragically breaks down during several action scenes due to the unimaginative use of grey blurs to convey the idea of the great speed at which swords are swung around. Seeing two enemies stand in front of each other, their bodies almost perfectly still, with a gray blur between them may work relatively well in a manga, where you're trained to fill in the gaps between a drawing and the next; it doesn't work as well in an anime, where you expect to actually see movement. I call this technique unimaginative as it's the most obvious one can envision among a plethora of different techniques that have been used so far both in anime and live action movies, one example being the alternation of very fast movements and slow-motion scenes.

The backgrounds and the character design are not bad at all, although they don't really show a particularly high production value.

Sound

Yet another category where Claymore definitely doesn't shine is the sound. The soundtrack is absolutely forgettable and deserves no attention; the sound effects are the average stuff that's been used in anime since forever. The voice actors are nothing to write home about either, a couple of them being particularly annoying. Whenever a Claymore (a female fighter) releases her Yoki (some kind of power), becoming somewhat more beastly, the unlucky voice actress bends over backwards to make her voice rough and evil, delivering spectacular failures.

Story

The watcher should expect the usual mix of themes used so much in most shounen: fight to protect, comraderie, weak vs strong, good vs evil, etc etc. The whole show unfolds in a medieval setting where villages scattered about the countryside are occasionally infiltrated by monsters that devour the inhabitants one after the other, disguising as humans between one meal and the next. Half-human, half-monster women, the Claymores, are usually called to deal with those problems. They wander from one town to the next asthe organization, as they call it, gives them assignments; they struck down all the monsters they can find in the village and move on. As they use their beastly powers, their monstrous side eventually takes over - that's how a Claymore inevitably meets her end.

The plot is composed of short stories fit within a larger campaign that leads the main characters to the inevitable OMG HUGE FIGHT at the end; as the plot moves along the many details of the story and the setting are added to the initial sketch, often with little sense of continuity and without too much regard for the rules the writer himself set at the beginning, possibly making it difficult to maintain the suspension of disbelief required by most fantasy stories. The story doesn't really end; at least a second season will be needed to wrap everything up.

Story just isn't the strong part of any shounen of this kind, so my criticism here must be taken with a grain of salt. I do recognize the emotional pull certain arcs have and hats off to the creator of the manga for the ability to create within the reader/viewer's mind an attachment for certain characters in a short timespan, yet what I'm talking about here is a set of episodes that barely accounts for one third of the anime. The rest of it uses so many archetypes without changing any of them in any interesting way that one can't possibly rate the story anything higher than average.

Characters

Well, characters and character development aren't the strongest part of most shounen either. Claymore fails in an especially spectacular way since it sets the characters up as unimaginative examples of beauty and strength disregarding the most artistically interesting part of a character: where does he come from, what is his world view, if and how he changes and so on.

Claymore's characters can be described best as a set of motivations: they are motivated to fight someone and to protect someone else. Additional details are chosen among the following: having lost a friend, having lost the parents, being in love and owing one's life to someone else. That's the end of it. Elements are taken from this small pool in different amounts and combinations and grafted on the "hopeless fighter" template. In other words they built the characters in the same way I used to build stuff with Lego bricks. This is no way to do art.

Personal judgement

I enjoyed watching this anime one episode every week and experienced several times while it was airing the "I want the next episode!!" fever. It's been an entertaining experience for most of the time and I never really stopped liking it. This, of course, has to do a lot with the other things I was doing in that period: I simply needed something like this show, something silly and violent, and true enough I got it and enjoyed it.

Overall

Nothing to get too excited about, but do add it to your own list of mindless action series you may want to watch.

Hey AniDB, so Claymore… another anime with no conclusion based on a manga that is (as of this writing) still ongoing. Seems to happen more and more these days… here’s my two cents of how this one went down.

Animation
Seems kinda hard to identify these characters
Yeh, it is. All the Claymores essentially wear the exact same costume… a white spandex bodysuit with silver shoulder pads, skirt and boots. They all wield the same exact sword (a Claymore is a two handed sword with a cross hilt if you’re wondering) and they all have silver eyes and blonde hair. There are little nuances in the faces on a few characters, but for the most part, it’s one character over and over again…

What about the content?
Well the coloring is good. Low saturation, very drab colors, looks good… and the line quality is good too. They do a good job of trying to capture the look of the manga… the manga characters look a little younger though. There isn’t an overwhelming amount of movement… lots of camera pans, flashes of stuff that are supposed to represent things moving fast. Trickery to keep the quality consistent and within budget ya know?

No, I mean what about the “content”... the gore factor man!
There is no shortage of flying limbs, severed heads, pools of blood… the gore details aren’t too descriptive… if that’s the right word. You don’t really see muscles, organs, or bones kind of details… just a juicy red (or purple) spray, or the old fashioned all one color with a little white bone in the middle of the limb…

Demon women with swords slicing stuff up sounds like it could be a fetish…
I think it is… but not here… there are females all over but there is no sex appeal at all… I think I saw a few purple demon nipples, I dunno.
• Looks/Visuals : 7/10

Sounds
How well did the voice actors perform?
There was no Japanese voice actor that stood out in my opinion. Hoko Kuwashima is our lead, and her resume is extensive (Inuyasha/Sango – Noir/Kirika) but I’ll be honest… her character Clare just didn’t have a wide range of emotions for her to work off of. The rest of the cast was just a bunch of over-tense screaming militant women. No memorable performances…

Anything else bad you want to say?
Yeh, there is… I was really bothered by the voices of the demons. All of them. They talked way too much, and they sounded stupid having just regular voices and being demonic or huge and monstrous. They needed some kind of effect to be deeper, and better dialog to sound more “larger” then a street punk talking smack…

Alright, well let’s hear something positive… the soundtrack?
Ah, this I liked. The music during the series was some fun “Kill ‘em All” old Metallica style distorted pop-thrash guitar riffs throughout. Get me pumped at least, I love hard rock and upbeat tempos. There were probably only 4 or 5 songs (they felt repetitive) but they were cool. No vocals. The music though wasn’t necessarily reflective of any part of the anime save it fits the violence…

Opening and Ending theme songs?
They keep the upbeat Marshall guitar sixteenth note barrage theme going strong… only one opening theme and one ending theme. Opening themes vocals stunk but the first guitar riff is GREAT. I need to learn it. “Reason for Being” by Nightmare (these guys also did the opening/ending for the first season of Death Note). Fun riff. The ending theme is by Riyu Koska… it starts a bit lame, but give it a moment and once the drums kick things off into punk rock speed it’s fun too.
• Score/Voice Acting : 7/10

Story
Okay, so it’s based off a Manga that is still ongoing…
Yep. And it is REALLY faithful to the manga, except towards the end… which uses many of the manga elements, but is changed a bit so that no new story lines (Dragon-kin, Black Claymores, etc.) are introduced… essentially, the last 2 episodes are semi-original.

What are the chances of a season 2?
Let me get my magic eight ball. The 26 episodes of the anime are the first eleven volumes (about 60 chapters) of the manga. As of May 1st 2009 the manga is up to volume 16 (chapter 92)… so the answer is… well, quite a while if it comes out at all.

So does it just end and leave us hanging like Berserk or something?
It’s not near that painful. Berserk (the anime) just ends right after a mega-super climax. This series I just don’t see being interesting for another 26 episodes… it follows in the same steps though… a billion unanswered questions still not answered in the manga… plot feels a bit lost towards the end, or maybe I just stopped caring.

From the story we do get, what of it?
Well right off the bat I can say one positive thing. Great pacing! The arcs are short (about 4 episodes) so it covers a good deal of ground. Our hero has quite the number of adventures and a few of them are really fun. Unfortunately the fun ends when the characters start to go “Dragonball”…
• Story : 6/10

Characters
So Clare is our main protagonist… a sword wielding female demon hunter of sorts right?
Yep. She’s a hybrid, half human half demon… works for a secret unnamed organization that hunts and destroys “Yoma”. She’s very militant and void of emotions. All the Claymore are for the most part. She reminds me of Sabre from Fate Stay/Night… only she doesn’t really get cool.

What about this “worthless male character”?
Oh my gosh I want to strangle Raki with his own hands… worthless is the only word for it. He’s a killjoy… he does to Claymore what that stupid “I’m a Mac” kid/actor did to Die Hard with a Vengeance. Sucks the fun out of every scene he’s in.

Well what about the villains?
Can’t spoil that… Claymores are their own worst enemy, struggling with the half demon within… that’s all I can say of this. I can say though that the other enemy… the endless demons… the weak grunt of the Yoma is drawn really poorly, but is humanoid… but the higher ranking ones for whatever reason start to look like animals… Turtles and Lions and stuff… I thought it came across very comical and didn’t fit….
• Characters : 5/10

Value
On what fronts does Claymore deliver?
Well, it delivers on all the tags… there is medieval action and adventure, demons, gore, superpowers, teamwork and secret organizations, tragedy to a degree…

What anime is it most like?
Claymore is probably the bastard child of Berserk and Dragonball Z… its uncle is probably Blood+ and its nephew Bleach.

Is it worth following the manga from the end of this anime?
If you like it’d it, sure! Like I said, it’s VERY faithful. Skip to manga chapter 55 or so and go on from there… but be warned, the manga is setting itself up for being never ending…
• Value : 6/10

Enjoyment
At the end of the day, how did you like it?
Well despite my mostly negative comments… it’s okay. The action scenes are fun. The heroes aren’t invincible and get a thrashing which I like. A few battles have some really neat elements… I like not knowing if a character necessarily will or will not live. That aspect is great! Now if they cut the Raki character out completely… made the villains look, sound, and act cooler and more mature and evil… and didn’t have the dopey “number ranking” and feeling power levels and super power attacks and going Super Saiyan thing with altered states, I’d probably like it more… despite the death and gore though, it is just too kiddie in my opinion.

Favorite moment?
Well the cannibalism in the cave was cool, but I’d have to say Episodes 5 through 8… fun story arc.
• Enjoyment : 7/10

Overall : 6.5

If you read it, please rate it, even if you hate it
Thanks!

As always my reviews focus mainly on story, character development, and overall cohesiveness of the entire anime. In my opinion that makes a good portion of any decent anime. My review also contains spoilers and isn't at all none-biased, so be warned.

So where to start. It's always hard placing a beginning. I'm going to be a bit critical in my review as I did enjoy this series thoroughly, just there were a few things which blatantly stood out like a sore thumb. First I'll get to the actual technicalities before delving into them completely.

Animation: This ranks right up there with the top. I don't know the technical terms, but this anime doesn't use a lot of motion, rather it uses very well drawn scenes that it pans across or is edited. The scenes are very beautiful and is reminiscent of moving art. As far as 'actual' animation goes, this anime doesn't excel there. Where the scenes are beautiful the action usually takes place in the form of slight adjustments to the scene. If the scenes were drawn bad I would rate it a lot worse then what I did.

Sound: The tracks in this series are very beautiful and they play at the right times. It reminds me of the music that was part of Junni Kokki. It fits the time period very well and blends. What I didn't like is in a few spots it pops out that the they're trying to blend in the music too well and it is overdone. Like the music starts before the scene starts and you pretty much know whats going to happen in that particular part before it does based solely on the music.

Story: The story wasn't all that amazing in my opinion. Demons and humans. What do you know? Oh there are half-demons which hunt the demons, which conveniently turn into ultra half-demons which then control the pure demons? Erm... perhaps it will make sense more in Claymore MK.2, which is obviously going to happen by the way it ended.

I'm not going to summarise the story as a few people have already done so here, but there really isn't much to it. The season doesn't end well at all. There are many loose ends left dangling. The ultra-mega-male-half-demon (I'll get to the male part a bit later on) played god and just watched what happened in the end battle as something completely off the charts. That said the three claymores ranked 1-3 didn't even take part in the end 'epic' battle. We only met number three who just watched from the sidelines..

In a nut shell the story is just a DBZ spin off, except no funny green people (IE, the hero gets beaten down, the hero gets stronger, the hero gets beaten down again). The last episode pretty much explains it all when the only thing the heroine chants is 'kill'.

Character: The characters are pretty well developed except for the hero. The heroine has a history, which dives pretty deeply into her past and relates it to what she is doing even if what she is doing isn't all that spectacular (IE she's just out for revenge). A relationship forms in the midst of all this between the hero and the heroine (although Raki isn't much of a hero). They split up, they come back together, there are hugs and kisses all around.

Raki, as many people have explained here is a annoying pissant. He does absolutely nothing! The only thing he seemed to be good at was surviving where everyone and anyone dies. Even when claymores he's around just get chopped up and mauled.

For some reason the illustrators decided to give Raki a sword. You know what you see Raki do with the sword? NOTHING! Well I'm sorry, he drops it and then the Claymores give it back to him at the end like it will make a difference. Seriously the character totally ruined it for me and pointed out just how much they wanted to have a gender role switch, which is another thing I'll get to.

If you ever watched Simoun this series relates heavily to it in the form of gender roles. All of the heroines don't really act feminine, even when they're getting raped they're like... it doesn't matter. I can understand the whole half-demon / half-human thing, but they push it a bit too far. The male half-demons act completely masculine. The female half-demons act completely masculine. I mean if you're a demon-human you're still male or female, I don't know why there is such a heavy push for male based female characters (yeah, yeah genre of course).

You know who acts feminine? Raki! Our loving, sword toting hero's only purpose is to function as a kill switch for Claire. When Claire goes berserk Raki defeats it with a hug an tears, which I might add in the end he completely failed to do and one of the Claymores ended up having to sacrifice herself in order to prevent Claire from going utterly berserk...

For how useless Raki is in the series and how much he shows up I half expected him to maybe get some muscle and defeat even the weak demons which female characters are resorted to doing in animes with male character taking the lead, but no he doesn't even get that. Raki does nothing besides say 'I'll protect her (Claire)' constantly and at the end you catch yourself thinking if god mode wasn't protecting him he would've been auto-tentacled which seems to happen a lot.

I do kid, the series would've been quite a bit better without him. In the end I found myself cheering for some of the male demons, as some of them turned out to be pretty cool (the lion king comes to mind) and all we're stuck with on the winning side is good'ol Raki and his awesome sword! Why didn't Raki suck it up, drink some dieing demons blood, and turn into a half-demon himself?

This doesn't really relate to character, but as long as we're on the issue, the Claymores in this series must be forged out of black matter or something cause they NEVER break... or dent... or scratch... and they're always polished even when the character is in shambles physically (literally limbs laying all over the place), their armor is in pieces (isn't it made out of the same stuff?), and of course their clothes are torn.

Claire picks up a normal sword somewhere around the beginning of the series and it snaps like a twig (which further questions Raki's ability with the sword and leaves you wondering why he didn't find himself a claymore yet), but the claymore doesn't. There is no explained truth behind it like a sword made out of plasma (ie light saber). A lot of inexplicable, yet important, things in this series have no backing behind them. In the end both the villain and the heroine have these convenient whip like tentacles which can shear off limbs and stab through rock... and each other, yet they're still using a claymore for some odd reason (for name sake I'm sure).

Value: I don't normally re-watch series so this is always lower then other reviewers, but if I linked this to being memorable and wanting to re-watch it for nostalgia I don't think I'd rate it very high. (be nice if I could just opt out of this vote)

Enjoyment: I liked the series a lot. It was a good distraction as I've been waiting for some decent anime to come out. If those glaring defects weren't in the series I would rate it even better, but they were.


Closing Thoughts: Seriously... Raki has some serious balls to follow around trails of body parts and a close encounter with two deep-dwellers without pissing himself and running away, yet he is absolutely useless in a almost comical fashion. He is all like 'I'm gonna protect this person that can turn into a ultra bad ass demon and pwn anything' when he can't even wield his sword properly which will inevitably snap like a twig anyway.

This leaves a very hollow caveat as he is a main character (he shows up too much for you to believe otherwise) and leaves me asking... why is he in this series? Raki could very easily be replaced with a female-female relationship. The two-male side characters you encountered for two episodes earlier in the series were a lot cooler, useful, and more fitting of any sort of main character role them him.

There is a ray of hope though. As this series left off room for Claymore MK.2 Raki somewhat developed in this series. It could've just been poor character development (by the authors), but he realizes towards the end that he is completely useless. He did get some sword training, which amounted to two days, after which he was still useless. This leaves me to believe his character may in fact improve more in the next season of Claymore. I wouldn't hold my breath knowing the genre this series fits into, but thats just a generalization.


Oh yeah, when people power up hardcore and you get the nice atmospheric glare from their power levels DBZ style, there should at least be a after glow... or maybe some sort of energy weapons.... Where exactly does all that energy go after they turn things up a notch? Another unexplained mystery of the series. It appears they just power up for show, as their actual ability power up doesn't correlate with their 'show' powerup. it's very antic-climatic. About the only ki based weapons in this entire series, despite the fact they they're obviously throwing off tremendous amounts of it, are the feather weapons one of the villains uses at the end. They don't even enhance their claymores, which are obviously more powerful then them for never breaking.

Criticism aside, this was a fun distraction. I enjoyed it... even if.... Rak...