The old "person with supernatural powers sent on mission to hunt others with supernatural powers" is a tried and true concept. Witch Hunter Robin is, to me, what Hellsing should have been. Take this equation: Hellsing = Style, Hellsing + Substance = Witch Hunter Robin. Robin isn't as "cool" as Alucard was in Hellsing when the series begins, but she would be able to kick his ass by the end.

Which brings me to my first point: the first 9 episodes of WHR are boring. It's standard monster-of-the-week fare with almost no plot in sight. However, once you get to episode 10 the show jumpstarts the plot and you will watch a plot that is leagues more complicated and deep than even Lain. The ending left me a little confused, though. The last scene of episode 26 gave us a little hint of what happens but we can't really see everything.

Second point: The music in WHR beats Record of Lodoss War and then kicks it, repeatedly, while it's down. It's emotional when it needs to be, it's uplifting, and sometimes it's near-silent. It always manages to generate the perfect mood. Add to this the fantastic opening and ending sequences and you have an unbeatable track. My favorite song from the show is definitely Half Pain by Bana, which is the ending theme.

Third point: The animation style is fresh and original. It's an animation style I've never seen in anime before and, thankfully, it doesn't remind me of any sort of american animation styles.

As Boney said, this series starts off a bit too slow. In a monster-of-the-week style intro to a series, there should be plenty of time for introducing and developing the characters. It seems that their story was lacking and they had to throw in some extra monsters in order so it would finish at episode 26.

Finally, the story does kick in and it certainly is interesting to watch. The characters have their obligatory "coming into their own" moments, the "true" evil is revealed, and an all out battle at the end. Tried and True format, but thankfully this series is not stale. They took an overdone format and did well with it. I do feel that even the main story felt like it was forcefully slowed down. It seems like this could have been a 13 episode series and been alot better.

More complicated and deep than Lain though? (see Boney's review). That I don't agree with, I found the story highly predictable and easy to follow... Maybe I just had a lot of lucky guesses, but I more or less predicted every single "twist" of the story. I found them quite obvious, and was freqently thinking "looks like I was right again".

As far as aesthetics, the series is certainly way up there. The quality of everything is top notch, be it scenery, animation, style or music. The action is well done, but can be over somewhat quickly sometimes (sometimes REALLY quick, heh). I didn't find the style to be all that groundbreaking... it had a certain "city-goth" feel to it (wearing black trenchcoats, but not really needing to). It was generally dark (visually), but thankfully not too dark (unlike Boogiepop Phantom). Overall, it was definitely pleasing to the eyes and ears.

In the end, I did enjoy watching the series. Although it was definitely worth watching, I didn't find it to be fantastic. The story was predictable and went far slower than I would have liked. Could have been done alot better.