Kingdom

Kingdom is an anime based on ancient china, the story revolves around two war-orphans,Shin and Hyou from the kingdom of Qin. Shin and Hyou are slaves with a dream of becoming great war generals,so they can make name for themselves.As result they train swordsmanship every day in  hope of fulfilling their dreams.

Episode 1 Summary

On the first episode (which is a 50 min ep) we can see that Shin and Hyou are best friends who both work hard to achieve their dreams of becoming War generals, amidst of their sparing session a carriage stops and a noble man walks towards them and asks them what they were doing, Shin and Hyou tell this noble man about their dream and showed him how determined they are to accomplish their dream.

Later on the episode, the nobleman appears at Shin's and Hyou's master house asking to speak with Hyou, the noble man  turns out to be a very powerful minister  and is offering Hyou a job at the palace. Hyou is hesitant to the offer because he didn't want to leave his friend Shin behind, after Hyou sorts out his feelings with Shin, he decides to accept the offer in hopes of becoming a general.

A month has passed since Hyou went to the capital and Shin keeps training in order to fulfill the promise of catching up with Hyou. Hyou manages to come back to the village barely alive and gives a map to Shin before he dies. Shin, debasted by his best friends death rushes to the location of the map following Hyou's last will, as he gets where map indicated he finds an old shack with a boy who highly resembles his deceased friend  Hyou.

My opinion 

The main plot seems awesome, for now at least, I like the way it's showing character developing with ease and smooth, not like some halved ass rushed way  show the characters are bad ass.

The character Design is  fitting to the ancient china setting and to the different personality of the characters.The only real complain i have about this anime is the animation.The animation seemed stiff at parts and that really brought down the quality.(I'm no expert this is only my opinion)