Rurouni Kenshin
What I liked about it: The cast. Most of it, anyway. The music – I loved the ending themes so much I became a fan of The Yellow Monkey and T.M. Revolution almost instantly. As a matter of fact I physically own almost all the albums The Yellow Monkey ever released, and I have the pics to prove it. I think I liked the story, but I don’t remember what it was about any more. The tragedy early on where the minister was assassinated and Aoshi’s troops were massacred really moved me at the time, being used as I was to happy-go-lucky series like Ranma 1/2 (more on that one day). At the same time it wasn’t a series about killing for killing’s sake, and I was just as satisfied when the series became less and less bloody with the passing of time.
What I wasn’t so crazy about: Kaoru. There’s a part later in the manga where she supposedly dies, only not really. I’m probably the only RK fan in existence who cheered out loud when that happened, but I really, really didn’t like Kaoru. And not in a fangirl “gyaaa, get offa my man!” kind of way because I wasn’t that crazy about Kenshin either. He’s a cool guy, but I was more a fan of the supporting cast like Saito and Sano. The final Enishi arc wasn’t anywhere near as good at the Kyoto arc, but it wasn’t terrible either. The series would have been too short if it was just Kyoto so for lack of a better ending arc the Enishi arc had to do.
Series quality in general: The action was slightly hard to follow at first, but it got better pretty quickly. I bought the Vizbig editions later and thought the translations were a little too heavy on the Japanese terms. The story wasn’t too memorable in the long term but the cast definitely was. The manga is a little better than the anime, IMO, but both are okay. Is it worth reading? Well it’s one of the bestselling mangas of all time, so I think they’re on to something there. In other words, hell yeah! Especially if you like action manga. If you’ve somehow managed to get by without watching it so far, get on it now!