Gangsta.

Episode 12

The title of Gangsta.'s season finale, “Odds and Ends,” is a lie. This episode doesn't have anything approaching a conclusive ending, and that isn't odd at all. I didn't expect much out of Gangsta.'s first-cour finale, considering how unfocused the storytelling had gotten in recent weeks. Erica, Nic, Loretta, and Marco prepare for battle, but the episode ends before they can even show up to the battlefield. The biggest event is that Striker – the member of the Destroyers who looks like a cross between Greed and Scar from Fullmetal Alchemist – raids Monroe manor. Worick tries to fight him off but gets defenestrated. Now one of our heroes is bleeding to death outside. Meanwhile, Monroe ominously looks over Ergastulum from his secret hideout. Is this the end for Worick? Several more manga volumes suggest not.

They say that “anime are made as advertisements for the manga,” and I don't think I've ever seen a better example of this than Gangsta. As the manga is right now, it would have been impossible to adapt a complete story into twelve episodes without entirely rewriting the whole thing. This anime reaches to about chapter thirty of a currently forty-chapter manga. The Destroyers arc isn't even done yet. If they wanted to make a good television show, the first step would've been waiting for more material. But they didn't, and now we're stuck with a horribly incomplete final product. I assume that they're anticipating a second season at some point – hopefully when the manga reaches an actual endpoint. Mostly this finale feels lazy. There's hardly a sense of culmination or even excitement. They pretty much just chose an arbitrary point for this adaptation to end. It's disappointing, but I didn't expect otherwise.

Gangsta.'s main through line should have been the moody romance between Alex and Nic. After all, the story's main appeal is sexy, older, yakuza-samurai. Give the people what they want. Unfortunately, Nic turned out to be mostly irrelevant to the narrative. Despite being the show's poster child, he doesn't have anywhere near the interiority that Alex and Worick eventually develop. Alex didn't even interact with him all that much. She spent most of her time meekly intimidated by Nic. In the beginning, Nic was the most exciting thing about Gangsta., but he's entirely wasted by the show, both as a character and as something to ogle. Oh well. The show's sexual interests took a violent, exploitative turn in general. While I still find it refreshing that Gangsta. largely treats sex work with respect, it ended up having more lascivious interest in the Destroyers' ultraviolence than anything else. That sort of thing is a lot more common (see Tokyo Ghoul, Deadman Wonderland, Future Dairy, etc.) than the initial Natsume-Ono-manga-meets-Kill-Bill carnal appeal we thought we were getting.

The biggest narrative problem is that the plot had nothing to do with the main characters. The current antagonists have sordid pasts with Marco, Delico, and Loretta – characters I hardly even knew before the conflict started. The story should get us invested in or at least curious about characters before feeding us their dramatic secrets. They should've started with fun, episodic adventures involving the Handymen household, then expanded out to the Monroe and Christiano families, with a special emphasis on the plot-important Loretta, Marco, Ivan, and Delico. The enemies should also have some personal beef with the Handymen. For example, maybe Nic's jerk dad is one of them, or they have some sort of connection to Worick's status as a long-lost mafia heir? Didn't Worick have a brother? This will all probably come into play during a later story arc, but with my engagement already so low, Gangsta. should have played those cards sooner rather than later. At least not every problem stems from the anime adaptation – these issues are 100% rooted in the manga.

The tonal problems were a consistent issue, but I've already discussed those in just about every previous writeup. Overall, Gansta. was a disappointment on pretty much every level. It had plenty of untapped potential. Nic is a great idea for a character. I ended up with some affection for Alex, Worick, Loretta, and even Marco. There's a largely untapped market of older-leaning fujoshi. (I'd harp on this less if it weren't the only unique thing the show had going for it – otherwise it's a muddy slop of rote anime ideas, like the shallow “discrimination is bad” narrative and people having parkour fights on rooftops.) Really, Gangsta. should've just been a story about people, not some half-baked gang war narrative - at least not right away. It suffers from trying for too much too soon, going for the big guns of some guy trying to wipe out superpowered minorities before the audience even knows who the people involved are. Its moody, introspective aesthetic was entirely wrong for the raucous direction it ended up taking.

At first it looked like Gangsta. might offer something different, if not necessarily good, but it wasn't even up to that by the end. If you were initially intrigued but ultimately disappointed by Gangsta. like me, I strongly recommend the show Michiko and Hatchin instead. It's a much more successful – and even thoughtful – example of the type of gritty entertainment for adult women that Gangsta. seemed to be going for, and the english dub even aired on Adult Swim recently for extra accessibility. If you want older hunks, there are always manga from Natsume Ono and est em. There are options out there – they just rarely get turned into anime.

Grade: C-

Gangsta. is currently streaming on Funimation.

Gabriella Ekens studies film and literature at a US university. Follow her on twitter.