FUNimation’s Case Closed: Season Four features 26 half-hour episodes of the wildly popular Japanese anime series “Detective Conan”. The main character is Conan Edogawa, a child with extraordinary intellect and keen observational skills.

Due to circumstance, Conan becomes involved as an observer and investigator in a series of mysteries, each typically lasting one or two episodes. Though the crimes may be fiendishly clever, in the end, Conan always discovers the perpetrator, and herein lies the beauty of the series.

As with any good mystery novel, clues revealing the culprits are provided to the viewer. To keep the answers from being too obvious, the audience isn’t privy to all of Conan’s insights, but we can basically sleuth the crime along with him. When he’s discovered the truth, Conan reveals it to us, and the genius way that he pieced it together. The result is a very satisfying series of puzzles with rational solutions, which makes at least one additional viewing of each story worthwhile.

A newcomer to Case Closed can easily jump into the Fourth Season DVD. Certain aspects of the supporting characters, and some of Conan’s amazing technological gadgets, may be a bit confusing when first encountered, but you?ll catch on.

What’s tricky is the series’ running hook. Conan’s really a teenage detective named Jimmy Kudo. Poisoned by some bad guys, he?s magically regressed to the age of an 8 year old body. To protect the people around him, Conan keeps his true identity a secret, and obviously hi-jinks ensue.

Visually, this series has a deceptively simple look. The clean appearance not only makes it easy to watch, but highlights important visual clues for you audience sleuths.

Though gore and mayhem are downplayed, Case Closed features murders ? and a lot of them. The violence is not extremely graphic, but there are plenty of images of corpses and the disturbing results of violent death throughout this series. It?s probably unsuitable for small children.

For lovers of mystery stories and puzzles, this is a great series. We?re looking forward to FUNimation’s release of Season 5, currently scheduled for May 2009, and hopefully they’ll eventually make it through all 500+ episodes that have aired in Japan.