This review will contain some spoilers; if you want to avoid them, please skip straight to the concluding paragraph.
Our protagonist, Nishijou Takumi, is an MMO otaku with a social life to shock even the most hardcore of anime fans. He spends every possible moment holed up in his room- which happens to be a converted shipping container on top of a high-rise block- even to the extent that he has calculated exactly how many lessons he can afford to skip and still graduate. On top of that, he has frequent delusions, the most common of which is that an anime character, Seira-tan, lives with him as his wife.
Pretty soon, however, strange events start happening in Shibuya. Several mysterious deaths have been dubbed the "New Gen" (short for New Generation) events, and most have fairly disturbing details. One evening, Takumi is playing games as usual when an unknown user called Shogun starts talking to him, and tries to send him several image files. Accidentally opening one, Takumi is horrified to see a picture of a man, nailed to a wall by dozens of cross-shaped spikes. He quickly tries to forget about it, but some time later, as he walks down an alley, a strange sound leads him to the very same murder scene he had already seen a picture of. The murderer is there too; a beautiful pink-haired girl, about Takumi's age and covered in her victim's blood.
Again, he flees, but the next day, Takumi is disturbed by the arrival of the pink-haired girl- Rimi- in his class. What's more, everyone seems to know her, and they all insist that she and Takumi have been friends for a long time.
So it continues, and more characters are brought into play. It turns out that most of the girls whom Takumi meets are known as Gigalomaniacs, meaning that they have the power to feed "delusions" into other peoples' minds, and even to make them reality. They often summon swords known as "Di-Swords" into existence, sometimes to fight with but generally for no real reason. We meet an evil organisation, Nozomi, who plan to use a machine known as Noah II to create artificial Gigalomaniacs and take over the world, and learn the terrible truth about Takumi- that he himself was brought into existence through the delusions of the original Takumi- a sickly, wheelchair-bound man who also goes by the name Shogun. Takumi must allow his Gigalomaniac powers to awaken if he can ever hope to defeat Nozomi for good.
It's very ambitious and often confusing, but most questions have been resolved by the end of the show. What started as a really interesting murder mystery with the twist that reality and memory may not actually be real, unfortunately degenerated into a "stop the evil corporation" type of plot. It still entertained, but by pinning all the blame onto one evil figurehead, a lot of the interesting setup from the start of the series was squandered.
The characters that drive the story are a mixed bunch. Takumi is understandably freaked out and wants nothing to do with the Gigalomaniacs or their fight, but it starts to grate a little when he's screaming to be left alone even when his powers and importance have been explained. Granted, most people would react in the same way, but this isn't the kind of anime you watch for realism; you watch it for the mind games and fighting.
Given the show's visual novel roots, you may forgive it for the fabulous array of stereotypes we have in the female leads. We have the old friend (even if Takumi can't remember her); the quiet, bespectacled upperclassman; the mysterious, vengeance-driven girl who gradually opens up to others; the transfer student (who can only speak to people through their minds); the shadowy but attractive girl who moonlights as the singer in a popular band; and the little sister. However, despite the painfully generic setup, they all become genuinely interesting, fairly well-rounded characters by the end of the series, and none feel unnecessary.
The art in this series is pretty average, with the occasional pretty and dodgy scenes balancing out. The character design is well done; all of the girls are easily identifiable without having any particularly outlandish features, save for Rimi's pink hair. I also really like the variety and imagination in the Di-Sword designs, most of which were fantastically impossible but great fun to watch.
As for the sound, again, it's utterly average. The OP and ED are quite catchy the first time you hear them, but by the end of the series I was skipping both. Insert songs are also fairly unmemorable; I can't remember any of them. Compared to two other visual novel adaptations this season, Clannad ~After Story~ and ef - a tale of melodies, the music is fairly lacking.
Despite these flaws, ChäoS;HEAd is still an enjoyable series to watch. I was genuinely looking forward to each new episode, and wanted to find out what would happen to everyone. Although it has several generic elements, it still strives to be original, and this sometimes helps lift it above average.
Overall rating:
4 - 3 - 4 - 1
12/17 - Decent.
Apologies for the lack of decent pictures in this review; I've lost most of the earlier episodes :(
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Nice review ^^
ReplyDelete:P See, i commented! haha