Scar on the Praeter talks a lot. There are some good fights and action, too, but it’s a lot of talking between characters. But what is the actual story? The main character, Kai Yamato, has inherited a powerful tattoo from another character everyone has strong feelings towards (though we in the audience never had time to develop any kind of relationship with him before he died). Now he is on the run and forced to join up with the dead man’s friends, and is being pursued by various other groups. But why? The motivation for all of these different groups is barely explored. Kai’s reason for fighting doesn’t seem clear. What are the stakes? What is the point? Everyone’s talking but no one is saying anything.

Maybe there is more to come, but there wasn’t enough to keep us around long enough to find out.

When Scar on the Praeter started, we were on the fence about how the story was being delivered. On one hand, it was not revealing that much, which we hoped was setting the story up for a big reveal in the near future. On the other hand, we felt like we had been dropped into the middle of a story without having seen the beginning and were desperately trying to figure out who everyone was and what was going on. Halfway into the season, it felt more and more like only the second part of that rings true.

There are so many characters in Scar on the Praeter, and none of them have been getting enough screen time or backstory for us to know who they are, what motivates them, and what their role in the story is. A lot of names and organisations are thrown around without much context. Even halfway through the season, we still get confused about what everyone’s talking about, which makes it hard to focus during the episodes.

One of the big appeals that made Scar on the Praeter interesting was its pitched story about a world with magical tattoos that are based on mythology and folklore. On one, very small level, Scar on the Praeter was doing that. Indeed, most of the main characters had a magic tattoo with a name from some kind of world mythos. The tattoos’ powers and origin were never really explored, though. Why is Cerberus from Greek mythology, and Fenrir from Norse? What powers do they actually have, and how did they get them? We only got to see a couple of short magic tattoo battles, too. Sure, the tattoos are there. They’re somewhere present in the plotline. But frankly, we wanted to see a lot more about them and learn more about them - they were a huge selling point of the anime, but were not delivered satisfactorily.