Kingdom is one of my favorite mangas having stumbled across it by chance after sinking my teeth into Vagabond some years ago. Finally digging into my evergrowing anime list I randomly picked Kingdoms anime adaptation as my next viewing experience thank you cool feature of AniList. To be honest for 2012 it looks really well: the animation the artstyle its pretty good... when its not using CGI. Im not really sure who greenlit this but the CGI here is horrendous and quite possibly the only tell this is a 2012 anime all things considered. While it gets better as the season goes on there seems no be no rhyme or reason surrounding its usage. One moment its a normal dialogue next frame its suddenly CGI. It does look decent enough for the wide shots and panoramic views of the battlefields but whenever it goes for closeups it looks horrendous. This goes double for characters. Early episodes with CGI Shin show him with very jittery and ugly facial features especially mouth movements while the few oneonone battles feel very clunky. By the end Houken vs Ouki one of the biggest highlights and pivotal moments in the story even now theres some reliance in CGI for some of its scenes but its used much more sparingly. Conversely I noticed every scene Shoubunkun is in has him animated in CGI which makes him feel weirdly 3D in the world and to be honest this disconnect between the regular 2D scenes having 3Dlooking models is what makes the CGI look so bad. Another bone I have to pick with it is the lack of any real violence and gore. If youve read the manga you know most battles if not all of them have an overwhelming amount of bisecting beheading and powercleaving through soldiers. Its often how the manga tells you this character is strong by how gruesome and effortless they can bisect a man. In here blood is only shown on nonfatal cuts or stabs. Moubu and Houkens cleaves for instance just send their targets away with unfathomable strength rather than the accustomed and expected experience of seeing soldiers getting physically cleaved in two. This makes some moments like Moubu and Tous spinning swings feel more overthetop and silly than they ought to be. You can still get a sense of strength but the lack of that visual expected impact in a war anime really is disappointing. When it comes to the material adapted it skips the entirety of the Assasination Plot arc which served to fuel the bigger battle of Seis and Ryofuis faction past the starting throne usurper arc. Everything else is faithfully adapted with the highlight naturally being Ouki himself and the battle of Bayou. The death of one of my favorite characters still has the same impact as it did back then when I didnt expect it and to see it without CGI is honestly surprising since the norules rule of its usage made me think they had restraint when it came to this scene which is once again one of the pivotal moments in the manga. Overall its solid past the clunky and distracting usage of CGI on the first episodes. But once it gets going it knows better when and when not to use it.