This anime is one of the best thrillers available. An edge-of-the-seat show from episode one to its magnificent end.

Essa maravilha é a melhor coisa que você verá em sua vida, por mim eu veria mais e mais, em um ciclo infinito

I consider this series one of the best detective stories of all time. Characters want to empathize, understand their feelings and motivation. I want to revise the dialogues in order to better understand the plot. The actions of L and Light make admire them. Everything is perfect in this anime.

Great concept, mediocre execution. The great thing about this anime is that it makes the viewer think about the emotionally addicting "tough on crime" attitude that society tends to put before due process, rehabilitation and rationale. It's scary to think about what a megalomaniac would do with so much power that is out of our control. The fear, the personality cults, and death lists resemble the regime of Stalin. Kira is a great villain for this story when he is at his peak, but the problem is he is always at his peak. Light Yagami is a brick with no character development which is very bad for someone who is supposed to be the main character. Kira starts off as a megalomaniac with a god complex and ends as a megalomaniac with a god complex. He is superhuman when it comes to school grades and life. He also wears incredible plot armor and dodges more bullets than Neo with no consequences. He is like a villain's fan fiction character. One big problem with the entire story is that with the decisions that Kira makes, he would leave a trail anyone could follow, he would easily be caught. To compensate for this, everyone else is turned into an idiot. Even L, who is supposed to be the smartest detective in the world, is a teen with little experience, who makes mistakes that no detective would ever make like divulging details of an investigation to the public or accepting the main suspect on his team. N is even worse, he knew who Kira is but spent the entire season doing nothing. The anime is worth watching for the dramatic moments but becomes frustrating over time.

Starts off great, but never gets better than the awesome premise. Light and L have some great duels, but most of the later mental gymnastics is a game of "Since he expects me to do X, I'll do Y! But he expects my counter, so I'll really do X! But he expects me to counter his counter, so I'll do Y instead!" This gets boring when major plot twists hinge on the "brilliant" characters revealing that they actually thought one level ahead. Misses some great plot points, character development, and moral questions. It's all downhill after the first few episodes.

The first 16 episodes were amazing, easily the best detective hero/villain story I have ever had the pleasure of watching. The following 21 episodes were utter garbage. It's pretty obvious the writer had spent a painstakingly long time working on the original storyline but couldn't bring himself to end it when it came time to do so. Either that or the story was highjacked by the production company and they did a pathetic job trying to mimic the original writer's abilities. I would highly recommend watching the first 16 episodes and then just stopping there to come up with whatever ending you choose, whether you want Light or L to win.

Don't even bother, yea the first season is amazing! but all it does is build for the biggest fail, they kill L and the show dies 'near' is a very poor copy of L and 'mello' is the worst character i have ever seen tries to act like a bad ass eating chocolate, turns from and edgy dark well written roller coaster of a plot to 'what the hell have they just done!' i will soldier on to see what happens..............well this just turned into a childrens show. thanks for wasting my time death note