Anime Review: Psycho-Pass 2

There's no reason to make this introduction overly long, I put this show on my ANIME I DISLIKED: 2014 EDITION list before it had fully finished airing and now that I've had a chance to finish the show I can say that it fully deserved being on that list. Since I am discussing a sequel, there will be quite a few references and spoilers to the first season of the show; this is not a review to read if you're considering starting the series, this is a review to convince you not to watch this season and to explain the many many things that went wrong in it. And on that note, there will be some rather large spoilers for this season as well, I just don't feel like I can adequately explain the sheer stupidity here without laying it out exactly as it happens.

Psycho-Pass 2

Anime Review: The Future Diary

I noticed that starting last year I always seem to be watching at least one action-y, gore-y show a season (which sometimes is horror like Blood-C and other times really isn't like Deadman Wonderland). Currently Zetman is filling that slot for me and back in the fall and winter The Future Diary which I had read the first volume (of the manga) a few years earlier and surprisingly managed to avoid all spoilers for the show as it was airing (well, except for one which sounded more like a promise of awesome than a spoiler and didn't make it into the show anyway). With a show that's so heavily twist-reliant I really recommend trying to avoid spoilers but I recommend avoiding spoilers for any series anyway (and as usual I shall try to keep this a spoiler free review, if I have to spoil anything it'll be in the footnotes).

The Future Diary

 Summary: Deus, the god of space time, is dying and with his death reality will collapse as well unless he can find someone to replace him. To determine his successor he selects twelve people, gives each of them a diary that can predict the future (based on how each of them used their own diaries), and the last person standing is the new god. The quiet, anti-social Yukiteru Amano isn't too happy with this turn of events but quickly finds that it's fight or be killed and teams up with another with another participant, the stalker-ish Yuno Gasai, to try and survive the game.


The Good: I was surprised that some of the side characters ended up being fleshed out and rather likable characters, even if they were still completely nuts. The pacing worked well and the twists certainly kept the show entertaining, and sometimes their ridiculous implausibility made the show quite entertainingly, although I suspect the story wasn't going for comedy in those instances. The best way to sum up this series is that it was entertaining in the way a summer blockbuster film is entertaining, fun but in a few years time you'll have seen so many others that you won't remember much about this one.

The Bad: Despite the fact that I grew to like some of the side characters more than I expected I could never get myself to care about any of the characters the way I normally do with a show. Almost everyone became so crazy that they almost stop being characters and are reduced to plot devices so it's a good thing that the plot was interesting. That said, the show is so twist heavy that I wonder how much re-watch value the show has. Yes it can certainly be fun to go back and see things be foreshadowed but so many of these twists came out of nowhere I simply don't see if there would be that much entertainment and for me my favorite shows are ones I want to re-watch because I can always find something new in them.

The Audio: Funimation sadly did not translate any of the opening and ending songs and when I tried translating the first ending song, piecemeal and with google translate, it just turned out to be a very odd love song (which makes more sense in retrospect) so this is one of those odd cases where I liked how the songs sounded more than what they meant. But overall none of the music left a really deep impression on me, if I had watched the show on DVD I would have skipped both of them after the first few times and none of the background music really grabbed me either.

The Visuals: As odd as this sounds when talking about a story in a visual medium, none of the art or the animation left an impression on me, good or bad. Everything was simply there, the art wasn't stunning but it wasn't the cheapest I had ever scene and all of the designs (sets/backgrounds, characters) were like that as well, they didn't add or take anything away from the overall product. And I suppose that is a bad thing, stories should be told in the medium that fits them best and, if the art wasn't contributing to the story, I wonder if I would feel any differently about it if it had simply been a novel instead.

In short, this felt like a series I watched and, while it wasn't bad, simply don't feel the need to purchase or rewatch. I can probably recommend it to a some of my friends and for anyone who is curious in checking it out Funimation has it streaming for the US and Canada and has licensed physical media rights as well (I believe both DVD and BRs). 

Anime Review: Deadman Wonderland

People who aren't fans of gore should probably avoid this series or not go looking for the BR/DVD rips of it (especially since it's on crunchyroll) because this is one of the bloodier and disturbing series I've seen in the past few seasons. That may be because I'm not a big fan of blood and gore shows but something about the plot drew me into this one, even if I had to close my eyes during some of the more disturbing scenes.

Deadman Wonderland

Summary: Igarashi Ganta was enjoying a normal life and excited for his upcoming class field trip to Japan's only private prison, Deadman Wonderland where the prisoners put on shows for the tourists, when his classmates are brutally killed before his eyes by "The Red Man", he's framed for the murder and he ends up going to Deadman Wonderland as a criminal instead. As brutal as the prison is there's an even darker side to it lurking underground, one that is connected to a little gift that The Red Man gave Ganta.

The Good: The pacing may be fast in this work, not surprising considering the staff had the daunting task of animating 21 chapters in 12 episodes (the first arc), but it's consistent and it appears that everything important was kept in. The story balances the action scenes with the downtime well, the downtime never felt like it went on too long or like it was happening when the characters need to go and do something important. The show has a good sized cast, although a few were cut for the anime, and many of the important characters get some backstory, quite a few characters actually considering the show is only 12 episodes long.      

The Bad: The ending of this series screams "hey there's more, you can't just see this part and not wonder about the rest of the story!" which means that if the viewer doesn't get a second season or tries out the manga they haven't seen a full story. It's impossible for every adaptation to tell the original story completely (at least in the first installment) but it should provide some sense of closure, the ending here simply felt like even more things were about to get going. Also, it appears that anime gave away a major spoiler much earlier than the manga (or at least made it more obvious) which isn't exactly a good thing. 

The Audio: The opening song is interesting since it's done by a Japanese band with an American singer so the English lyrics sound great (in fact, if you didn't know this was the theme song to an anime most people would just think it's from an American rock song) and the song is actually a cover of this song. The lyrics are completely different but there's no question that the instrumental parts are the same which is all rather interesting, I've never seen an anime use a cover that doesn't use the same lyrics as the original song. The ending song is much less interesting, a slow song (which accompanies images of the cast from before they ended up in Deadman Wonderland) which feels strangely out of place with the rest of the series.

The Visuals: This series is a rather gory one, gory enough to have some censorship and in some places the censorship just feels dumb, especially when it doesn't work. In the first episode, after The Red Man has gone on his killing spree in Ganta's classroom, the entire scene is darkened so the details can't be made out as well, there the censorship works but later in the series a character gets an arm partially chopped off and the area where it was chopped off is blurred. It's still completely obvious what happened and makes the blur feel just stupid, it's not hiding anything. All of that will be removed for the DVD/BR release eventually in any case and as for the rest of the show it looks fairly good. There are plenty of fighting and action scenes which all look good (and usually pretty cool due to the nature of the fights) and the designs for the many characters all seem to stay consistent.


This show recently got licensed by Funimation (when they went and licensed almost a dozen recent shows that had already been streaming) and I honestly don't think I want to see the uncensored version of this show. If there is a second season I'll watch that (and the show seems to hint strongly that there will be one) but I just don't know if I want to rewatch this. I am curious about checking out the manga however it was published by Tokyopop so it's now out of print (it is still running in Japan however) so that means it's less likely I'll follow up on that urge.  

Manga Review: Variante (volume 1)

I had a bit of an odd conversation with a librarian lately when I was being checked out, I think it was when I was checking out this book, that I thought might be interesting to share. It was an older woman who I hadn’t seen around a lot (and believe me, after almost five years of volunteering, I recognize a lot of the librarians) who was taking an extra-long time to check me out and mentioned that one of the books I had on hold wasn’t in the library after all, the AX manga anthology. I was a little surprised; all I remembered about the anthology was that I got the recommendation from it off of ANN, but apparently the library thought it had sexual material that was unsuitable for teenagers and didn’t simply shelve it in the adult fiction instead. That said, then she had no trouble with checking out this comic which I found in the teen comic section that has a big label on it saying PARENTAL ADVISORY and a cover promising gore to come. Now I’m really curious to see if the AX manga had sex that was somehow worse than all the gore in this one….

Variante by Igura Sugimoto

Summary: One night, for an unknown reason, Hosho Aiko and her family are killed by a monster but Aiko wakes up three days later in a morgue seemingly fine. However, one of the arms of the monster has grafted onto her body, replacing one of her own, and seems to have a life of it's own at times. Because of these strange things there are several government agencies who are interested in her, those who are devoted to eliminating monsters like the one that attached itself to her. 

The Good: While this is a fairly gory story, there’s no denying that, none of it is the kind that will leave a reader disturbed for days on end (it reminded me of what little I’ve seen of Six Billion Needles and Guyver, both pretty gory but not without some reason). The government organizations here are portrayed as fairly capable and fairly logical (some sections are cold-hearted bastards but they’re cold-hearted bastards who know how to do their jobs) and the choice they offer Aiko is a surprisingly nice one, a chance to fight with them and discover the secret behind her parent’s death instead of simply being dissected for her abnormality. Finally, this is a dark story and the manga-ka isn’t afraid to prove it by showing a lot of characters dying, and not simply background characters, so kudos for that.

The Bad: It’s really hard to get a feeling for how good this story will be from the first volume. It’s a solid start to the story but it’s treading familiar territory, can it do anything really different that will make it stand out? It does show promise but the premise is built upon tropes and, while it plays those tropes well so far, it just hasn't done anything new with them. 

The Art: The art is fairly detailed which is a good thing, the more detailed a monster it is the easier it is to show just how disturbing they are. The monsters (and the gore) are suitably scary and grotesque looking and everything else is well-detailed as well. So there is certainly no problem with the artwork and it does it's part in the story quite well.

So, I was interested by the series but just don't really want to make an effort to find the rest of the volumes. It was published by CMX but they managed to publish all four volumes and all of them can still be found for a good price (come to think of it, the only CMX manga I've found that has an engorged price is Two Flowers for the Dragon, I wonder if that was one of their bestsellers) so anyone who is interested in the series should go right ahead and check it out!