Black Lagoon

Black Lagoon is an action, adventure, drama, suspense, thriller, comedy, dark comedy, Japanese anime series. It was based on a manga which was written by Rei Hiroe and published by Shogakukan for the magazine Monthly Sunday Gene-X.

Plot
Black Lagoon takes place in the 1990s and it revolves around the Lagoon Company, a group of smuggling mercenaries that mainly operate around the seas of Southeast Asia using a large boat called the "Black Lagoon".

Why It Rocks

 * 1) Incredible animation.
 * 2) Black Lagoon has an outstanding cast of female characters. While not all the characters are female, and every character stands out and are great, the female ones are especially worth mentioning. There's Revy, of course, the leader of the Lagoon company, but there's also Balalaika, the leader of Hotel Moscow, Eda, a badass nun, Shenhua, a Taiwanese Assassin, Gretel, twin sister of Hansel, a psychotic orphan child.
 * 3) Gorgeous art-style and character designs.
 * 4) Revy's and Rock's relationship is very engaging.  The show does a great job of balancing the line between it being a standard friendship and a romantic relationship.  While they never have any explicitly romantic scenes in the series, and it seems to just be a friendship, if they did form a romantic relationship it still wouldn't seem out of place.
 * 5) Amazing soundtrack.
 * 6) Rock is a very interesting main character. He starts out as a naïve, annoying main character that's so common in anime, but he gets lots of character development and becomes just as badass as the characters that surrounds him constantly.
 * 7) Great voice acting in both sub and dub.
 * 8) All of the side characters are also interesting and entertaining, such as Dutch and Benny, also of the Lagoon Company.
 * 9) Phenomenal action scenes.
 * 10) The show has an eerily dark and disturbing atmosphere, while still managing to successfully balance it with some dark comedy.
 * 11) Excellent pacing.
 * 12) The dialogue is very humorous.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) The characters can be unlikable at times.
 * 2) Most arcs are switched out of order from the original Manga. Though this could be due to Madhouse trying to make the anime adaptation less episodic and less confusing for those that want to keep up with the story.
 * 3) Some filler including the infamous part where Roberta loses some parts of her body in the Season 3 OVA series which in the manga, she didn't suffer any loss of her body parts which will mean a re-adaptation of season 3 if they want to adapt more arcs and chapters to make season 4.