In my opinion Monster is a great anime. It is a very unusual anime with no real supernatural stuff and an overall realistic style. It is very psychological and has almost no actual action, just an exciting story. It is slow from time to time but the story overall is so wonderful and i can honestly say it changed my view of life. I highly recommend watching it, even so it requires some patience in the slow parts. For those who already watched it, what is your opinion?

IT'S GOOD

I finished watching Monster a couple weeks ago, and (I think?) I thought it was great. It's a little hard for me to pin down exactly how I feel about it in terms of the continuum from absolutely terrible to TEH BEST THING EVAR! because it didn't leave me with the sense of elation I usually have after watching something that I would consider great. But when I think about the show, I don't think I can give it any other one-word description.

In particular, I love how realistic it feels--the colors, the tones (of the colors, of the characters, of the characters' voices, of the story, etc.), the faces (oh god, the faces were amazing!). As far as the voices go, I've only seen it in Japanese, so I can't speak for the English dub, but I thought the Japanese dub was excellent (to the best of my ability to tell something like that in a language I'm not fluent in). What I did notice that I can say with certainty is that the Japanese voice actors do a great job of conveying what a character is thinking and feeling through the tone of their voice. I plan to watch the English dub as well, because I read that some of the sounds (I'm guessing background music and sound effects) were changed from the Japanese version, and I'm curious to see how that affects the feel of the show.

I've read that the places and times were done so well that they would've had to have been heavily researched, but since I don't know that history, I can't say with any certainty that it's true or not. Although, with how realistic pretty much everything else is, I wouldn't be surprised.

The pacing is slow at times, but I didn't think it was forcefully slow. In general, I think Monster has a slower pace than most other anime (at least, judging from the anime I've seen; and I have seen a pretty wide variety of anime).

And I loved the ending! When I saw the last scene, I was like "Oh, damn" and a little shiver went up my spine. And then a few days later I read this on a forum post on My Anime List, by the user SimmianPrime: "I actually had a little chuckle (after my initial "no fucking way) as the credits were rolling on the empty bed. I thought "funny if we heard the sound of a toilet flushing and then Johan walks back into frame and just gets back into bed" lol". Luckily that didn't ruin the ending for me, but now I'm sure whenever I watch Monster, I'll have a chuckle of my own when I see that scene.

Really hope that HBO does a live action version.