All of my reviews contain spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning. Dorohedoro is something of an ideal seasonal. Wellmade interesting entries into undersung genres tend to make the best seasonal anime short of actual capitalI Important shows and Dorohedoro is indeed that. Trafficking in the same broad bloodnmud actionseinen aesthetic as things like the more serious No Guns Life Dorohedoro puts a distinctly oddball twist on that genre. The series is set in a fairly detailed constructed worldor rather a pair of them. Our heroes the lizardheaded Caiman and his BFF/possibleromanticinterestbutwehaventreallygottenthereyet the blonde Nikaido hail from the town of Hole a city full of ordinary humans that just so happen to be preyed upon by the mysterious maskwearing sorcerers who live in the next dimension over. 880https://i.ur.com/MLflp1a.png 880https://i.ur.com/PNxp9uu.png The show splits its time about evenly between these two settings both are quite distinct as much from each other as from general cliche. The series plot is complex enough and just plain weird enough that summing up the plot beat by beat risks lapsing into dry recapping but the generality of it is that our protagonists are split between the Hole group centered around Caiman and Nikaido and a second Sorcerer group introduced a bit later on who live in the Sorcerers world. These characters are largely the henchmen of wizard/mob boss En who has punk rocker hair and can turn anything he breathes on into mushrooms. 880https://i.ur.com/BAAZOPN.png This is what villains should look like just for the record. Over the series twelve episodes which cover less than a quarter of the manga which ran for nearly 20 years from 2000 to 2018 Caimans quest to figure out what sorcerer turned his head into that of a lizards and moreover why dovetails into larger intrigue that involves the En group some of Nikaidos own secrets and dozens of other things. Along the way we get to witness some of the better CGI to hit TV anime in recent years not to mention some wonderfully gory action scenes that are guaranteed to make you wince at least once. The directing courtesy of Yuuichirou Hayashi keeps the whole thing tight preventing it from getting lost in its own admittedly wideranging plot. To say the series is a little gonzo feels like underselling it. The whole thing is delightfully outthere. Original mangaka Q Hayashida has a talent for this kind of thing and it colors the entire work. This is actually something that helps the series keep from falling prey to the common problem of over selfseriousness in this kind of work. Theres a healthy dose of humor in here. Both classic slapstick and more bizarre running gags. My personal favorite being a roachman named Johnson. Hes introduced early on as a monsteroftheweek and is defeated only to later return as a sortof ally capable of saying the word Shocking and nothing else. Dumb? Yes but thats not a bad thing here. 880https://i.ur.com/eq3Xlg5.png Even the series gorier moments are often cut with humor to take the edge off. The other main thing that keeps Dorohedoro ticking is its character writing. You wouldnt necessarily assume that something that stars a lizardman and is this hyperviolent would be particularly wellwritten but the characters come alive through their motivations and backstories. Theres a hardtoqualify realness to the characters that makes even the villains a joy to watchsomething thats quite easy to do wrong especially in this genre. If it seems like theres not much else to say about Dorohedoro thats only because its so good in such a selfevident way. This is a series that is often content to speak for itself.