*NO SPOILERS*

Death Note is a series that I hold very dear because it illustrated to me that anime/manga can be very smart, clever and at the same time, enjoyable.

When I first read the series, I loved it and considered it a masterpiece; I wouldn't do the same thing now, but it's still a great series.

The series itself is very clever in nature and is very original. It has great use of literary devices such as foreshadowing which can be seen in the first chapter, great character development, and several red herrings peppered throughout the series. The mangaka duo, Ohba and Obata, seem to change Shounen manga series each time they write a series. With Death Note, they delivered a great complex mystery thriller that is a great gateway for people who generally don't like manga or anime.

Story:
I really liked the cat-and-mouse game between L and Light. Each battle was extremely intense, and each genius always was attempting to outclass the other. The subsequent arcs were very methodical in nature and greatly planned out. The whole story basically questioned your morals and whether or not you thought it was right to kill criminals to create a utopia in a extremely hypocritical manner. The second half is much weaker than the first half as an important happens that changes the course of the story; the second includes two very prominent but weak characters who seem to be duplicate L's. That's it; it was as if you took the "logical" side of L and turned that into a character, and his "emotional" side and turned that into a character resulting in two very bland characters: Near and Mello respectively.

Characters:
First we have L. L was an amalgamation of everything odd with humans. He was an extremely paranoid individual who really didn't know how to present himself in society whilst at the same time being so incredibly intelligent that many people considered him to be one of the smartest in the world. He was pretty cool with his weird quirks, BUT he was also pretty bland, almost only there to move the plot forward with his plans against Light. On the other hand, we have Light Yagami. A genius high-school student who goes through a mental rewiring once he basically attained absolute power. Each is essentially the polar opposite of the other, as Light is clean, presentable and neat, while L is a "mad-genius". The cat-and-mouse games between the two geniuses were so cleverly done that in order to outclass the other, you would have to secretly kill people while eating potato chips. Yes, potato chips.

Basically what I got from L and Light was that if wants to be so intelligent, then that person must border on insanity. This was exemplified through the actions of both individuals.

Near and Mello were very poorly handled, and I think it's an unfortunate result of Shueisha insisted on continuing the story of Death Note; Tsugumi Ohba possibly felt that the series was coming to a close after the death of a certain character. Either way, I personally didn't like the characters or the subsequent second halves as much as I did with the first half.

Art:
Obata does an amazing job with his crisp drawings of all of the buildings and character designs. With his great understanding of human proportions, you have great scale drawings of humans and the shinigami.

Overall, Death Note is a great series with amazing art, an amazing first half, an OK cast of main characters, and one hell of ride. The pacing can get sporadic at times during the second half, but the aforementioned cat-and-mouse games and great use of literary techniques and themes makes up for it.

*Congratulations if you got through my incoherent review!