Trese Netflix Review: 9 Ups & 2 Downs
Castlevania's worthy successor brings something wholly unique to adult animation.
In many ways a spiritual successor to the recently concluded Castlevania, with supernatural elements, fantastic animation, and an unapologetic amount of horror and gore elements, need to be something special.
Thankfully, Netflix's newest original adult anime, Trese, makes a huge impact with its first six-episode season.
The series is based on an award-winning, long-running Filipino comic property, with a majority Filipino cast to match for its original English language release. It follows supernatural investigator Alexandra Trese, and the cases she must deal with as she attempts to keep balance between the supernatural underworld and the human world she must protect.
The character of Trese is reminiscent of other long-coated, supernatural noir characters such as John Constantine, but her position in life and commanding presence stands in stark contrast to other magicians and supernatural investigators.
Her cases are set in modern day Metro Manila, with the horrific, monstrous fictional underworld mixing seamlessly into the horrific, real life underworld of the most densely populated city in the world.
With 7 graphic novels and multiple spinoffs from writer Budjette Tan and artist Kajo Baldisimo, as well as an enormous fanbase looking out for its release, there's a lot of content to cover for later seasons.
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Minor spoilers for characters and events in the Trese Netflix Anime.
11. Down: The Pacing
Netflix's original anime offerings have had an overarching problem of not giving their stories enough episodes to breathe, and Trese falls to that issue, though not quite as badly as certain other series.
The pacing is excellent throughout most of the season, but its conclusion feels like it needs to explain too much all at once, which makes it feel a little bogged down in comparison. Mysteries that were laid out meticulously throughout the first five episodes are revealed in quick succession, with much of what happens in episode six feeling like it could have benefited from at least one more episode, if not two.
The fact that animated series generally come to 23 to 30 minute time frames means that trying to tell a complete story in six episodes is an even bigger challenge for animation than it is for live action.
It isn't quite as bad as the four-episode pilot season of Castlevania, which itself was more a prologue than a full season, nor the strange stumbling conclusion of the Yasuke anime, but one hopes that Trese gets at least eight or ten episodes in the second season it teases after its climax.