YMMV / B: The Beginning

• Awesome Music: The ED sequence "The Perfect World" with music by Marty Friedman and vocals by Jean Ken Johnny from the group MAN WITH A MISSION. The score is no slouch either, coming from Yoshihiro Ike, the man who worked on Ergo Proxy.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: It's not uncommon for one of the main things to get mentioned about the show was much of it's gratuitous butt shots.
• Cliché Storm: The Anime combines supernatural thriller with tropes from a crime novel and a conspiracy thriller. Whether it succeeds or fails is depending on the viewer.
• Complete Monster: Gilbert Ross is the coroner for the Royal Investigation Service, and a Serial Killer who proves that sometimes Humans Are the Real Monsters. In a flashback, Gilbert resents his father's growing sympathy for children being raised to be super soldiers in the Jaula Blanca Institute and kills him. Seeking to destroy his father's legacy, he lies to Minatsuki that he'd used as spare parts for Koku (one of two perfect progenitor clones). This lie led Minatsuki to betray the school and kill Heath Flick (Keith Flick's father and the headmaster of Jaula Blanca) as well as almost every child in the institute. After this, he goes to college with Keith and becomes obsessed with Keith's adoptive sister Erika. When he finds out she loves her adopted brother romantically, he vivisects and slices her into bits before tossing her remains over the mountain and framing a Reggie (a demihuman bred to kill) for the crime. He proceeds to kills 37 women who look similar to Erika, and covers up crimes committed by Market Maker (a corrupt Black Ops organization led by Minatsuki) to the point of having Jean Henry Richard brainwashed to attack Bran and then commit suicide in front of Keith. Eager to break Keith and make him stoop to his level of brutality, he lures Keith into the institute and mocks him over Erika's death. There, Gilbert reveals his involvement in the institute's destruction and Erika's death before he tries to kill Lily, forcing Keith to kill him.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In the second episode, in a brief bit of levity, there's a moment where Lily, stuck in a crowd, verbally lambasts whoever just felt her up, threatening to arrest them. Later on, in a very uncomfortable moment, Gilbert actually does feel Lily up, even going so far as to compare how she feels to Erika.
• Nightmare Fuel: The brutality shown in the series can be very unnerving at times, with special mention going for episode 3, showing the discovery of the real poison gas being found alongside two bodies with the skins hanging in the wall with nails alongside bloody writings.
  • Now, imagine this: the perpetrators behind the skinnings and the poison gas aren’t random run-of-the-mill psychopaths. No. They work for a Black Ops-esque group with inhuman abilities, who’ve been enacting these atrocities in the hopes of drawing out the progenitor of their species (or rather, his clone). To top it all off, they’ve been doing it for years.
• Sequelitis: Succession was not well received by fans of the first season. While no one would go out of their way to say it was great, most people who have watched it will point out that it at least had a plot, some decent visuals backing it up and the overall insanity of many plot and character elements making the overall product somewhat enjoyable. Succession would be criticized as a glorified Post-Script Season with its uneven pacing, subpar art and animation, overdoing it on the Padding despite its halved episode length, and knowing next to nothing about what do with its returning cast (with Keith getting the worst of it, being sidelined in an isolated room by Kirasame for most of it), much less its new characters, themselves considered a step down from Market Maker and Gilbert. None of this was helped along by how the plot of the first season gets sidelined for Koku and Kirisame's grudge with each other. Something that not only doesn't get resolved, but the season itself ends while they fight each other, leaving the outcome unknown. What little of the plot that does get shown mostly involves Lily driving the King around Cremona, completely unaware of his role in the conspiracy, similarly ending just as suddenly when the RIS, and the audience by proxy, get stuck back at square one thanks to Kirisame's interference. This wasn't helped when both series creator Kazuto Nakazawa and producer Rui Kuroki confirmed that not only was the season was meant to be part of Season 1's overall plot and cut for time; but that the No Ending cliffhanger in Episode 6 was always intended to be its finale from the start.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Lily and Yuna started as strong female characters (Yuna being capable to hold her own against Koku, though he held back and Lily being the Only Sane Woman towards Keith's antics and the only one who knows Keith's hiding place when he was framed by Gilbert), but in the final episode, the ended up being Damsels in Distress instead, getting kidnapped by Keith and Koku's Archenemies (Laica and Gilbert) in the final episode.
  • Season 2 doesn't fare much better with them and their characterization. While nowhere near as treated as poorly and damsel-y as they were late in Season 1; Lily's role has been reduced to spending most of the season driving around Cremona while Yuna spends much of her screentime as a Living Prop hanging around Izanami. Asagiri, the new character introduced in the season, is likewise not immune to this. Despite being the Distaff Counterpart to Koku and bosting about her being better than him, she gets beaten by him in their first major encounter and nearly killed by him in their second. It's telling when Kaela, a supporting character from the get-go who gets a far more diminished role in Season 2, gets mildly more characterization from her mostly static and stoic role in Season 1 in only a small amount of screentime by comparison.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Courtesy of Production I.G. The animation was gorgeous despite having a rough spot in its storytelling. Averted for Season 2, which takes a noticeable step down in quality due to its production happening during the COVID-19 Pandemic of 2020.