Claymore is the story of Clare, one of the women who give up part of their humanity to fight the monsters known as 'youma' who feed on the flesh of the living. These women are known as 'Claymores' because they all wield large two-handed swords somewhat reminiscent of the real-world Scottish sword of the same name. The Claymores are obsessed with their rankings, as the organization they all belong to provides numerical rankings to establish a pecking order based on fighting ability. By rank, Clare happens to be the worst fighter in the entire organization. Clare, however, proves to be much more interesting than her number would indicate.

Claymore is a 'swords and sorcery' styled fantasy story, though without any actual sorcery. In fact, I would refer to it as falling in the 'dark fantasy' genre because much of what goes on in this world is depressing. There is no fight against a great evil, or any epic quest to retrieve some magical artifact to save the world, or anything like that. The people in this world achieve success simply by surviving to fight another day. The world has a lot of youma, people are generally mean to each other, and it's really not any kind of place that I would want to visit. Even the Claymores, supposedly the saviors of mankind, are mean to each other. Some of them get a thrill by beating up and even killing other Claymores. A good chunk of the show seems to involve sororital rivalry of this kind.

The saving grace of this show is Raki, a teenage boy who winds up bonding with the weakest Claymore, Clare, who saves his life. While the character of Raki is occasionally annoying, he at least sees the good in people where everyone else would rather just casually ignore or kill them. He proves to be of surprising benefit to Clare in more than one instance, and acts as a good center point for the viewer's attention. While the story isn't totally told from Raki's perspective (there are some flashbacks to the past and jumping around to different groups of Claymores throughout the show), he is the only member of the cast that appears to have basic humanity. The fact that he has enough of it to make up for everyone else's deficiency can get annoying at times, but nobody's perfect.

I must admit that I did not like this show. This has nothing to do with a lack of technical quality, as the sound direction and animation are both quite good. I did find many of the character designs to be a bit 'harsh,' but I believe that was intentional. As I previously mentioned, this isn't a nice world, so it wouldn't breed nice looking characters. Ultimately, though, I just found the storyline to be depressing. Bad things happen to people and Claymores show up to deal with it, but they are generally all jerks obsessed with their status within their organization. There are some exceptions to this, and it is those exceptions that make the show interesting, but that's the general rule. If you like your fantasy stories dark and depressing, you will probably love this show. Another thing to be aware of is that this is a fighting show. Some major battles will even last multiple episodes. This is all done in standard anime fashion, with lots of crazy action (pretty much every character that gets even a minute of screen time has at least one signature move unique to them) and pauses for dialogue at dramatic moments. Some people love this kind of thing, but it really doesn't do anything for me.

I also must admit that I found the ending of the series to be a rather lame deus ex machina that resolved nothing. There is a significant build-up to what you think will be the final cataclysmic battle between Clare and her sworn enemy. While the writers do go there, once they get there nothing gets resolved. This provides a perfect setup to a second season, of course, but as of the time of this writing I am not aware of there being one. Therefore, the story feels incomplete to me.

In the end, I was probably the wrong person to review this show, as it isn't the kind of thing I usually like. While I do enjoy a rousing fantasy tale, I prefer to not be depressed during most of the journey. While I do enjoy action shows, I prefer to have battles get wrapped up in less than three entire episodes. I also like a decent ending that provides something akin to closure. Alas, sometimes I am disappointed.

Thanks to Funimation for a review copy of the DVDs.