I recently finished watching the Soul Eater anime. The first half of it was really good. Unfortunately, the second half's plot was laughable. Despite not having read the manga beforehand, I could immediately tell when the anime's plot veered away from the manga's.
My first impression of Soul Eater was that it was going to be an anime a lot like Bleach, but I ended up being wrong. I came to that conclusion after noting that the main characters were very much like the Shinigami in Bleach.
To summarize the plot fairly quickly, it revolves around 2-3 person teams of weapon meisters and humans that can transform into weapons. When I saw the first couple of episodes, I likened the weapon meisters to Shinigami from Bleach, but they're a little different. The weapon meisters kill evil humans instead of monsters that were once human. Okay, they are starting to sound more similar now that I think about it.
I didn't like Soul Eater's characters at first, but they've grown on me. My favorite character is Crona, but I can see a lot of myself in Tsubaki. Black Star and Death the Kid's personality traits were pretty annoying at first, but I think they became less annoying as the series progressed and the characters grew up a little bit.
Now that I've finished watching the anime, I caught myself up with the manga. It was interesting to see that some parts of the anime's second half were taken from the manga, but were altered for plot. For instance, I was convinced that Buttataki Joe was an anime-only character.
I'm looking forward to seeing how the manga develops. I'm going to have to give the anime only 3 out of 5 stars, though, since the second half's plot was a failure.