Ephman's not the biggest anime fan, and so that's what makes this series so cool.  His exposure to the art form goes only the extent of Voltron: Defender Of The Universe, Transformers, and of course the classic film Akira.  But never has he watched a complete series from the front cover to the back.  Still he's blown away at just not only how complex the animations are (so much cooler then CGI when you think about it), but also the intricacy of the plot.  Hey the series runs 814 minutes long, so it has to have a deeply well thought out plot or else he'd just have been bored after 5 minutes.

The story is that classic good versu evil thing you hear so much about.  The story spans over 6 years of Light Yagami's life while in possession of a Death Note.  When Light thinks of a face and a name of a person and write it in the Death Note, they die.  The power of possessing this Death Note takes over him and he parlays his own brand of justice.  Killing 1000's of people he deems a criminals.  Now this is where the plot starts to become fun.  Not only is he Kira (the people's name for this "judge"), but he's also part of his father's investigation to find and bring Kira to justice.  Crazy eh?  But wait that's not it... add L, M, and N into the picture, and throw Kira writing L's real name into the Death Note and taking over L's persona and you have one seriously messed up story.

There are some downsides to the series though, even as good as it is, it's riddled with hokeyness.  Take near the end of series for example, when for some reason an episode starts with all this slow motion slow music emotional effect stuff.  And from a cultural perspective, all these stories have been popping up about people making their own Death Note's and writing names of their enemies in it.  And then there was this murder in Belgium with a note left on the body that said "私はキラです" (I am Kira).  But aside from that, this is just an awesome Anime series that maybe will make Ephman look into watching another one.