I still have yet to finish this anime, even though the rest of the episodes are sitting next to my computer.
I really do enjoy this one, but I just don’t want to find out what happens to the characters. I really like Light and I know that all can not end well. N and M kinda bore me. I prefer L to them.
I really didn’t like the movie because it didn’t have all the nuance that the anime had. They just tried to blast through the major story points and everything else suffered. The story isn’t quite the same, but I wouldn’t necessarily give them a bad rap for that (its what happens to misora).
I saw an episode of this last night, it’s the first I’ve seen, and it seemed like a whole bunch of really cool moral dilemmas and a detective story mixing with it. The art was cool, too, but not so much the drawing style, that’s pretty average, as the way visuals are used. The only thing I dislike about it is that, for all the talk from everyone about how smart and clever he is, he honestly doesn’t seem so intelligent. In the one episode I saw, he has a pretty big flaw in how to avoid drawing suspicion to himself by, you know, doing things that will very much draw attention to himself from any decent detective, let alone a bizarre master.
It helps to watch the show from the start. Both L and Kira do things to draw attention to themselves throughout the show as tactical moves. They turn out not be such bad ideas. Either way, it keeps people on their toes, keeping the show interesting throughout.
I could be missing some information that makes it wiser, but I was specifcally referring to Kira planning to kill the FBI agent following him, specifically, and leading to a the busjacker’s death when the agent is already looking to see if he’s Kira. Since that FBI agent is after Kira, if he died and none of the others, whose names Kira doesn’t know, get killed, I think it’d be pretty suspicious. Plus, the agent might be a little suspicious of the busjacker’s sudden death, especially right after it’s publically come out that Kira can control minds, within reason, before killing. Maybe he’ll do something later on to fix it, or we got some information about the search earlier that I missed telling me it isn’t so bad an idea.
It’s not that big a complaint. Writing “perfect crime” type stories is very, very hard because few people, writers included, could pull off a perfect crime.
At that time, it wasn’t known that he could do this all in advance therefore there was no way for him to expect this whole scenario to play out the way it did because Kira wrote all of it in advance. He also had no way of knowing to what extent Kira could control people’s actions. Considering the circumstances of the hijacker’s death, since the hijacker was a known criminal, and the intensity of the hijacking in question, there was no way in the end for Ray Penbar to know this was all Kira’s doing. Also, there was no one who knew that Kira knew his name, minus maybe his wife and she gets killed when Kira gets worried.
Sure everything is always 20/20 in hindsight, but that doesn’t mean that it is when it happens and it wasn’t.
Yeah, but the entirety of criminal and detective work is thinking enough steps in advance you’ve got hindsight for the actions you’re currently taking. I’m certainly not saying he’s dumb, he’s just not the criminal mastermind he’s painted to be.
It’s funny, cause in one epsiode (possibly 25?) you find out that this is pretty much exactly what he’s done. It’s awesome. 
Oh, then I stand corrected.
I just watched episode 13 (Confession). Holy CRAP Light is such a bastard. Of course, this makes me love his character more than ever lolz
I just finished the anime series. I’m a bit disappointed with the ending 
Mikami is some kind of huge idiot. First, he should never have went to the bank. He knows very well that there’s an SPK agent tracking him so he should not do anything that deviates from his schedule. Second, he should have taken a page from the note, kept it on his person at all times, and used <i>that</i> as the thing with which to kill all the people in the warehouse. Third, he should have told Light that he killed Takada. This might have also alerted Light to what was going on. This is a huge screwup compared with the amount of care he had taken in all his other moves. So in the end, Light got cocky, and Near got lucky, and that’s how the mystery was solved? And then Near has the nerve to go on a huge rant about how when him and Melo combined their powers (when they <i>didn’t</i>, the only abilities Melo showed was an obsession with chocolate and his idiocy in getting both his friend and himself killed) they could surpass L. Near’s cunning is far inferior to Light’s, and the only reason he caught Light was due to dumb luck. Lame.
Yeah, I was disappointed by the end too. I hella liked Light until the very end though when he went all crazy and started acting like a moron. If he just stayed calm he might’ve been able to get out of it. I liked L a lot more than Near and Mello too. They were a bunch of idiots. Boo. :<
From what I’ve seen of it, it seems that the manga goes more into what Mello was doing, but I’m not sure.
The ending to the anime was a bit disappointing from that point of view, though.
I watched the series, recently, inspired by the minour drawback I found evidently not being true, and I’ve gotta say I agree that they really do fuck up at the end/the whole second arc. I think that L’s death is the main flaw in the storyline, as it destroys one of the primary moral conflicts issued as a part of the plot, and leads to the disappointing ending Cless mentions.
Seriously. Either L wins or he doesn’t. We don’t need M and N so that M and N can die so that we can go down the whole fucking alphabet
Yeah. While I wanted L to win, as I’m on his side in the story’s debate, generally, I could’ve accepted him losing. Light was a genius, too, and had a very deadly tool on his side. It should’ve ended there, though, and it would’ve been like the boxer you bet on losing. It was a good match, you wished the other guy won, but ypu had a good time watching it and you can respect that the otherguy out-did him. M and N are like some guy from the audience tripping the champion as he triumphantly leaves the ring and causing his neck to break on a stool or something. It’s that dumb. It’s so fucking stupid I can’t even come up with a simile of some reasonable way it would fit into another situation. If Light beat L, Light won. That should be the end of it. Letting two other detectives who just wanna prove themselves and think they do it when they’re just lucky takes away the whole moral conflict and chessgame feel of the series.
It is a good series, and I have the first movie. I should have also bought the second one when I was in Vancouver back in August.
Being fair to the writer, it would make sense for L to have a backup ready. I agree though, I wish it weren’t such a poor one. 
I don’t think that the ending is so dumb and I think that [SPOILER]killing L is necessary. Killing L is meant to do 1 thing: it is meant to show that Light is a fucking bastard. The show progresses so that you care about both characters and it gives you hope that Light might not kill L because of the bond that seems to develop. But no, what ends up happening is that Light succumbs to killing L to win. It is symbolic of Light’s selfishness and meant to abolish any desire you might have to see him win. He is not supposed to be seen as a good guy. As soon as he kills L, he does more and more things like this further reinforcing this point.
Also, I think that it is important to see what happens after Light wins because we see that his utopia doesn’t come true. The future becomes fucked up and instead of having a perfect society, its severely flawed. This further invalidates Light’s purpose.
Finally, the ending is appropriate because it shows that humans are imperfect and that as soon as Light started involving more and more people into his plot, the more he set himself up to failure. Near got lucky, yes, but Near also took into account that Light’s tactic set himself up for a mistake to happen, which Near and Mello set up with Mello sacrificing himself. It also asserts that L was superior to M and N. What M and N had was Light making a mistake. L had Light in his sight forever, he just couldn’t do anything about it and as he drew close, he just got unlucky. You can’t blame him for getting himself killed by the shinigami. I really like how Light walked to his death and Ruykh took him down. I felt that the way that was presented was nice from an artistic point of view.[/SPOILER]
Oh that Light, he’ll always be a good guy in my heart! <3