Death Note is not your standard anime nor is it your standard TV show for that matter. It's a psychological drama that excels at probing into questions of morality and what it means to be good and evil. It focuses on a cat and mouse chase between hunter and hunted but it's masked through the idea of criminal vs detective and what's crazy is that there are times when you can't tell who you're rooting for.

The show uses anime inner monologues to their fullest by using them for exactly what they should be, inner monologues. It actually sort of feels like something Shakespeare would have written and it plays masterfully when each character tries to outsmart the other. Each scene gets more intense as the conflict escalates and nothing ever seems simple. Even when you think that something has been solved or recieved closure, a new element brings it back until you can't imagine how it can get more intense, which makes it all the more satisfying when you're proven wrong.

Death Note shows that an anime doesn't have to be action packed to be interesting, nor does it have to be overly humorous with constant jokes and inuendos. Death Note instead relies on psychological tension to carry itself and by doing so breaks away from the many cliches that surround anime in general. The story makes you think and it refuses to make things easy. It makes you think so much that you can't help but wonder if the character's are just inteligent prodigies or just people who use their inteligence to the maximum. As two brilliant minds from L and Light constantly force each other into tight corners it makes them wonder who's truly the master intellect and if they really can win this battle of wits.

If you can get into this psychological aspect of tension than you will love this anime, but you have to have the inteligence to follow it or else it doesn't make much sense, meaning this show unfortunately isn't for everybody. Despite this it goes above and beyond in being suspenseful and it is one of the best anime's you can see.