The Garden of Sinners Chapter 1: Overlooking View (Thanatos)
This was okay I guess. Considering the hype, I'm not impressed. Not yet anyway. It's weird, each film has its own MAL page, so I feel kind of obligated to rate each one individually, but it's still a film series, one that is non chronological at that, so I kind of feel bad for giving this a 7, when I think the series on the whole could be better. It certainly has potential, the animation and music was fantastic, and the story wasn't even bad, I just think the fatal flaw is that it doesn't establish itself at all. We don't really know anything about the characters, their relationships to one another, how the world works in terms of spirits and the like (and I'm just assuming they're spirits), what the character's motivations are or what their ultimate goals are. It didn't really confuse me per say, I could follow it, but it really didn't explain a thing about what was going on. The biggest headscratcher for me was definitely the 8 spirits that occupied the building where people were jumping from. Why were the spirits there of people who hadn't died yet? There was a few confusing lines about how time worked in the building but I could barely make heads or tails of it, definitely could have been streamlined. Not sure if this was down to the writing or the translation though, it honestly could be either.
The next film seems to be set a few years before this one, so maybe that will do a better job of introducing everything, which would make this story a lot better in hindsight. I'm going to stick with a tentative 7/10, but it honestly could change depending on later entries.