jgzinv

From ANN:

Takumi Nishijō suffers from intense delusions as a result of his apparent schizophrenia and the extremely secluded lifestyle he lives as a hikkikomori. One day he accidentally stumbles upon a gruesome murder scene, a part of a chain of events called “New Generation”. After this, his life gets caught up in these events, and he meets a bunch of increasingly insane anime girls with swords.

Zinv’s Take:

Honestly, I couldn’t structure my thoughts together better than the ANN summary, so there you go… Began watching CH since I’d just finished Stein’s Gate.

ChaosHead like the two following reviews, is a chain of Japanese dating sim games that were well received and then adapted for anime. They all have ties to each other, such as character crossovers or cameos. CH may or may not be in the same timeline as the other two.

To their credit, many such games are shallow and vapid in terms of plot. Traditionally you just have to pursue a course after one character and tread a fine line of responses to reach whatever ending has been setup, good or otherwise.

While there are such animes out there, here the production company went farther than the source material and tried to create a story.

The animation is clean and quite bright.

Alternative Take:

In the interest of full disclosure, I started fast forwarding and skipping episodes around Ep. 5, then caught up around the last three. My reasoning being that the main character is constantly having psychotic or lecherous delusions, which really make no sense other than to serve to illustrate he’s a nutjob. As introduced, he lives in a shipping container packed with anime figurines of one character, and envisions her constantly playing the “desires fulfillment” role.

The supporting characters end up being all female stereotypes, that for added “whizzbang” factor, can pull psudeo-real giant swords out of thin air, due to the power of will or imagination. Instead of trying to kill each other as they start out, the group eventually bands together as a evil fighting force/protection squad for the male lead.

The twist here, being that the main character isn’t real, but a delusion himself, created by a far older original. The world is breaking apart and chaos is being caused as the original can no longer maintain he grip on his “reality” since he’s nearing death.

One of the female support team is the primary love interest, who’s completely devoted to both the new and old Takumi for the entirety of the show. She manages to play up the too cute/bloody murderer side of things. Acts like the most powerful of the group, yet fails when it comes to standing against the villain so we can get 2 more episodes of pandering out of the show. The ending pretty much involves Takumi casting multi-delusions on himself inside of a delusion (yes it’s a delusion-ception), in which he gains ultimate power for a minute and creates an impossibility. As everyone crawls out of the rubble, they agree to live in the same shared delusion.

There’s not much if anything in the way of justification given for anything, you’re pretty much supposed to watch, try to survive the no-sense plot, paper thin cookie cutter characters, and pray it ends quickly. If you fed random episodes of power rangers, paranoia agent, and some high school anime through a shredder, then coated it in LSD and ate it.. the result would be ChaosHead.

Verdict:

Anime – 1.6

Zinv Says: “Ow my head… it was all a bad dream right?”

Stein’s Gate

Stein’s also comes from a dating sim style game, however it departs from that formula quite extensively and focuses instead on plot to great effect.

In Stein, we have Rintarō Okabe who goes by the mad scientist name Kyōma Hōōin, going to a conference on theoretical time travel with his childhood friend Mayuri. Kyoma plays at having delusions of a massive evil organization out to get him, and frequently talks to his turned off phone requesting support from a virtual agency helping him to defeat their plans. As an over the top character, he typically makes grand speeches or blows anything he can out of proportion, and pretty much doesn’t know a thing about what science he’s spouting.

After having a heated argument on time travel with the young scientist prodigy Kurisu Makise, he’s near to where a giant object crashes and destroys part of the building. Searching around he finds Kurisu lying dead in blood, panics and leaves. Kyoma sends a text back to his hacker friend who stayed at their rented room “secret base” and suddenly things shift. Once outside he finds that his friends can’t remember certain events of the day, and neither can anyone else. The most surprising of all is Kurisu is still alive.

At their “laboratory” room, Daru the hacker works on things they cook up, the childhood friend Mayuri (Kyoma’s fake-hostage) makes lunch, and Kyoma tries to figure out what happened. Kyoma had mistakenly sent the text back in time via their phone-microwave… which typically produces gel-bananas, and gel-chicken tenders instead.

Given time, Kurisu gets involved and supplies the brains, Daru supplies the code, Kyoma supplies the posturing and crazy, Mayuri gives the tours. They get the future gadget / texting time machine working predictably and start experimenting with texts in more and more complicated ways.

In the process they run afoul of CERN (of Large Hadron Collider fame) and get mixed up in stories of John Titor, a self proclaimed time traveler. CERN being a real, evil organization working on time travel to control the present.

In the course of sending the texts, reality is diverged into more and more variations (butterfly effect), but the only one that remembers everything from the previous histories is Kyoma. More people become involved with the time machine and send texts of their own that drastically change history and the city of Akihabara. The text machine soon gets an upgrade to a memory sending machine, allowing the user to effectively time jump back a short period.

Kyoma finds it’s not all fun and games when the lab is assaulted and people are killed right in front of him. That starts a chain of mad attempts to save lives, but events repeat no matter what he does. In this far darker reality, he has to get each person that sent a text to reveal and reverse it, including one person who’s after his life. In the process of reversing the timeline changes, he’ll have to make the choice of having Kurisu killed again, or seeing others die instead.

Zinv’s Take:

Well if you didn’t gather from the long “summary” I like this one a lot.

The story is very well developed to pull you in, it manages to hide critical plot changes very well, and still connects you to the characters, and even throws in a romance sub plot too.

Even with what I wrote above, there’s tons more to see: You have a time traveler from the future that comes back to see her father and was part of an armed rebellion. There’s lots of tie in’s with internet lore and things like Warner Von Braun, the twist on CERN and them being a far reaching outfit for evil was well done and surprising.

The first third of the show is really setup for the development both in situations and characters of the latter two parts. It does take a very sudden shift into the dark side of things once people start getting killed and Kyoma is desperate to save everyone.

There’s a bit of humorous product placement as well, like Dr. Pepper being the “Intellectual Drink, For The Chosen Ones” among other things. There’s a great couple of scenes regarding lab coats, that to an extent, became memes on their own.

Kyoma and Kurisu’s banter and development pretty much solidified the show to a large degree. There are a couple favorites in their scenes that stand out, but I won’t spoil the fun for you.

Ultimately it’s a very well put together, intricately fitting series, that anyone who is a fan of parallel dimensions, or time travel, or mad science should thoroughly enjoy.

Alternative Take:

If anything I’m a little irritated that the true ending of the show, which is a OVA episode (25) isn’t included with the main series as it should be. The main cast goes to America for various reasons and Kyoma gets arrested about 4 times in as many minutes just getting in the country. It has a good ending. It is required to watch the OVA as long as you see the rest of the series first!

Some of the repeat sections do get a little old (ie. groundhog day style), but they are almost always told from another angle, or done differently. It’s nothing like the infamous endless 8 of Haruhi. To a degree it was done to express desperation, and give you a taste of how many times Kyoma was jumping, in which it served it’s purpose.

Evidently a movie which extends things beyond the OVA has been released in Japan this month, but no subs have come out for it.

So… while I’m sure I could pick at it given another viewing, there are a few places where the foreshadowing is obvious, my only real complaint is there’s not more of it already ready for consumption.

Verdict:

Anime – Solid 8.6

Zinv Says: “Even if the world line changes, as long as you don’t forget me, I’m there”

“El Psy Congaroo”

Robotic’sNotes

Robotic’s Notes takes place 9 years after the events in Stein’sGate

and can be considered a distant sequel, as some of the characters do show up.

The plot ceneters around Akiho, a girl who is dead set on fulfilling the dream of her now largely defunct robotics club at school, that being to create a full scale mobile giant robot.

By her side is Kaito, whom never has interest in anything besides playing the robot battle game Kill-Ballad on his tablet. Kaito frequently will challenge anyone who wants him to do work or expend any effort by saying he’ll do it, but they have to beat him in a game. Kaito being ranked 4th best player in the world, never loses.

Akiho and Kaito both are survivors from a mysterious event on a cruise ship, where each one of them will get weak or stressed, and experience time moving extremely slow or fast in the form of “attacks.”

As time moves on and things get more complex, more characters show up, such as the creator of Kill-Ballad, Nae Tennoji from Stein’s, a karate club member, and Akiho’s sister.

Akiho will move heaven and earth trying to get the club’s giant robot built, made up of mismatched huge parts that have been left behind in an abandoned hanger. So she starts out competing in a small hobby robot competition to strike a deal with the school to get funds. Either they win and get money, or fail and have to close the club.

While they do end up winning and gaining an ally, they are not allowed to keep the money. Essentially set back after set back occurs to try and crush Akiho’s dream.

Along the way, their interest in building a giant robot is picked up by JAXA, where Nae comes into the picture, as they are an outfit which helps supply special interest groups. Akiho initially rejects them and tries things her own way once again, only to create a giant robot that can only move a few feet before failing due to it’s massive weight and old diesel engine.

Meanwhile, Kaito has been traveling around their island with his tablet and using it’s augmented reality program to discover hidden files. These files describe secret plans to experiment on people and cause mass genocide by way of using solar flares and robots. Early on Kaito meets an AI that guards the location of each set of files, although she has two personalities. Each file also has prerequisets that must be completed before the file can be unlocked. So whenever he’s not forced into helping with the club robot, Kaito is wandering about the island trying to find these files, even though certain adults pressure him to leave it alone.

After a key character’s death, they do get to go to the robotics festival with their new and stripped down robot, but it looks like the lead robot of their favorite anime when viewed through augmented reality. At which point the series shifts very abruptly to dealing with Akiho’s dream of getting to the festival, to travel to save the world from a black hole bomb being launched at the sun (yes you read that right).

The cast has to get another robot working with the help of everyone on the island, as their mobile unit was destoryed when the robotics stadium was attacked. Then attack the shuttle lauch platform being guarded by Akiho’s sister (in mecha), who’s been brainwashed by another AI. So you have more of a David vs. Goliath bout.

Zinv’s Take:

Ok so I spoiled a chunk of the plot. For the positives side of things, it does try to take a peak into our future with augmented reality playing a heavy role in the series, as well as motion capture and input controls that we’re just now getting a grasp on. It does take a bit generalized, but practical approach to building robots, which is nice to see.

For such a large cast of characters the show does manage to try and keep it’s focus on Kaito and Akiho, which is a good thing.

Animation throughout was very good and well done.

Nae gets to have a few “bad ass” moments for looking like a 20-somethings field secretary. The little “too-ta-roo!” girl from Stein’s takes out a platoon of armed soldiers on her own in short order.

CERN returns from Stein’s as well, to be a source of problems, still trying to control the world. They remain a threat, but not nearly as direct or involved as Steins portrayed them.

The one main death in the series is done well enough to make you irritated they died in the fashion they dead. So mission acomplished there.

The blink and you’ll miss it final ending, that portrays the future several years after the main ending, is a nice touch.

Story wise, I’m split on, so I’ll cover most of that below.

Alternative Take:

Honestly the story as it goes, I think is paced a little slow, and then it demands that we accept in very short order (as in the span of 2.5 mins) to switch over to the rushed “save the world” plot line that was building up across the series.

Sure there is is foreshadowing, but they keep it so hidden via the secret file unlocks over a long period of time, that it’s obscured. The quick rebuild of their original robot, was probably done to say that when everyone works together, you can make a miracle, but at the same time, when you’ve spent 18 episodes building the last two, amongst many failures, isn’t believeable.

There’s several overly “conveinent” moments where things just happen or fall out of the sky “literally” to solve their problems, which ends up making it feel like a cop out.

The relationship between Kaito and Akiho is pretty much resolved in 3 minutes in the episode before last. If it had been actually given a little more time to be shown or matured, probably would have had more impact, though it was a nice scene. Kaito suffers from being a jerk or too lazy to help for a vast majority of the series, so it’s hard to like the character, even as a gamer myself that loves robots.

While the plot or story was somewhat generic, there have been other “I wanna build it!” animes before, it did play some new angles and is generally entertaining. However just like it’s main character, it suffers from several setbacks that mar the resulting output.

Verdict:

Anime – 5.9

Zinv Says: “If you’ve seen Stein’s Gate, give Robotic’s a shot for the sake of seeing it (if you have nothing else pressing in queue). It’s not a waste of time, but just don’t expect to be amazed either.”