This story is exactly the kind of story I love. It definitely is supernatural, it happens in rather ancient Tokyo and has nice young men for main characters. (What? I like young men, don’t judge me.) It even has a church resembling the catholic church thrown into that. Quite an interesting mix.
The main problem I have found with the story is that it is not always very clear. It is inspired from an ancient Japanese tale and, obviously, without prior exposition to that tale, it is a bit difficult to get. Thankfully, everything becomes clear at the end. But it still took roughly 20 episodes to get to this point. It is a bit long.
Actually, the series is mostly a collection of small stories. More than half of it is entirely dedicated to the introduction of characters. It makes for a very slow build up and a very slow explanation of the real story. On the other hand, since the story is different at every episode, it is almost fool-proof against boredom. The only problem is that it detracts from what is supposed to be the main story.
…Yet despite the problems I just wrote about I found the plot to be rather entertaining.
I guess the real reason why I enjoyed this as much as I did is the characters.
I liked them quite a lot. Everyone of them I liked quite a lot. I think my favorite were Kobungo and Genpachi. I do not really know why (it is not the uniform I swear), maybe because they were the most endearing and the ones I got to see developed the most. They were after all some of the first characters to be introduced.
The next one is Satomi because Satomi definitely seemed to hide something during the whole series. I thought he was the kind of plotting guy I usually fall in love with but he ended up being pretty cute and he surprised me until the very end.
The main two characters were a little less interesting. They were the usual, Sousuke was calm and caring and that was pretty much it, Shino was the annoying little boy type and barely anything more. He was more interesting than Sousuke because the anime focused on his struggles more than it did on Sousuke’s. I would have liked more focus on his inner turmoil.
Some other characters were pretty useless though, like Hamaji. She was introduced from the very first episode and ended up not doing much. I thought she would be a main character but she did nearly nothing. It was quite a shame, not that I liked Hamaji but they too quite some times to introduce her, it is a waste of screen time they could have used to actually explain things.
Despite all of this as I said, I quite enjoyed Hakkenden. I am not sure I would recommend it to everyone but I had a good time.