And while the Oscars celebrates the "best of the best," there's an equally recognizable award that does just the opposite, The Golden Raspberry Awards. Better known by its shortened name The Razzies, since 1980, it has served as the antithesis of the Oscars by honoring the "worst of the worst" to come out of the film industry. Needless to say, this isn't the award anyone wishes to be bestowed with. And if anime titles were to ever be given an equivalency to the Razzie award, I can safely say that Ranpo Kitan: Game of Laplace would be nominated with flying colors.
Overworked, ostentatious, and utterly deplorable, Ranpo Kitan was a tethered together mess with inconceivable plot twists and dizzying tonal shifts that relentlessly forced a narrative along with no proper rhyme or reason. It's a title that fails so much that it transcends to an ethereal plane of stupidity, becoming something like a "how-to" guide to making a bad anime. An achievement so successful in fact, that as an end result, it manages to turn shitty writing into an art form.
Ranpo was classified under the mystery genre but was better suited to be seen as a comedy. Trying its best to tell an interweaving story of a conspiracy, we're introduced to our trap protagonist Yoshio Kobayashi, or who I like to refer to as Fujoshi-kun, as his mundane life is flipped upside down when he finds himself involved with a detective after a gruesome murder. The rest of the story chronicles Fujoshi-kun's misadventures with this detective and the rest of the wack jobs they encounter along the way.
The mystery genre tag for Ranpo Kitan is extremely misleading since most of the cases have no real "mystery" behind it. For the most part, the show is simply dedicated to showing fucked up psychopaths and the extreme methods they're willing to take in order to murder people. There's no guessing, there's no clues, there's no investigation, just a bunch of crazy dimensionless lunatics killing people in very over the top ways. It's like Spike's TV series "1000 Ways to Die" with an extra serving of vanilla homoerotica. And at the off chance, the show does try to tell a mystery story, it became irrelevant since Fujoshi-kun and the detective Kogorou Akechi are basically the Houdinis of solving crime. With little to no foretelling clues, they're able to piece together a case as if it was simply routine. There's no proper answer given and when they made any attempt to explain it, the reasoning was convoluted logic that only made sense when the writers retcon past events.
Another poor element the show attempts to use is a highly volatile sub-form of math known as chaos theory. Like time travel, chaos theory is in its fledgling stages of understanding and falls more into the realm of make-believe than factual content. Most of what is known of it come from a lot of guess and check work that ultimately pans out to a dead end. To put it in layman's terms, it's impossible to prove accurate. And since math is all about accurate assessments, trying to incorporate such an unstable arithmetic equation in a real world setting only comes off as stupid. And that's precisely what Ranpo attempts to do; it takes an asspull theory and uses it to haphazardly explain away events as "it's all according to plan" logic. If you use an inkling of common sense while watching this it'll frustrate you to no end. It's the equivalent of a "mystery" show making up bullshit as the story goes along and pretending it was predestined.
But perhaps the aspect of this show that became the most grating wasn't the ludicrous story but rather the ill-conceived cast of characters that populated it. This is a show that's asking you to take things seriously while presenting a loli teacher who looks like she's 10 but is actually 32, a fujoshi bait lead who is far removed from reality and think everything is "fun," a man who wears a paper bag over his head and watches little girls, a masochist that wets herself, a detective who's a living breathing Gary Stu, a 4th wall breaking medical examiner who happens to be a loli, and the list just goes on and on.
These caricatures that make up Ranpo Kitan are tonally conflicting with the dreary atmosphere the story is trying to present and as the story continues along, they somehow manage to get worse. It's a motley crew of one terrible personality after a next, each one adding a headache inducing layer to the show. This conflicting tone between the characters and story results in some of the worst tonal whiplashes imaginable. Dark scenes can be immediately followed up by yaoi fanservice or poorly placed comedy. Nothing is treated seriously despite the show's desperate attempt to be serious and as a result, nothing feels significant in the least. Just poorly handled "dark" moments being forced to share screen time with subpar humor.
The only thing Ranpo deserves recognition for was its audiovisual presentation. It used very interesting techniques to convey certain scenes and even had a few motifs, that while too deserving for such a badly written show, still helped to enhance it from being a complete failure. Some notable examples were the 'butterfly effect' visuals that tied back to chaos theory (obviously being represented by the butterflies) and silhouettes being used to show a character's relevancy to Fujoshi-kun within the story, by either masking the person in it or having them step out of it. It was a well thought out idea that deserved credit for its inclusion. No, it wasn't on the same pedigree as something Masaaki Yuasa or Kunihiko Ikuhara would use but it was certainly a step above average.
The opening and ending theme were also nice ear-worms and even had accompanying visuals that were well paced. "Speed to Masatsu" by amazarashi, which served as the opening theme, was a catchy progressive rock fusion song that really got the blood pumping. Certainly a standout track from the summer season. The same could also be said about the ending tune "Mikazuki" by Sayuri, a bittersweet ballad that hit the right high notes while building into a nice pop rock anthem finish. They were both sonically soothing and were great as stand-alone listens.
2015 saw with it a sleuth of detective/mystery anime titles, Ranpo Kitan was yet another statistic. However, out of the bunch, Ranpo was quite possibly the worst to make its debut that year. And for that, it earned its Razzie and spot in the annals of shitty anime.
Enjoyment: 3/10
The only thing I enjoyed was the opening and ending themes... the show itself can jump off a cliff into oblivion.
Overall: 2/10
I'm not going to mince words here, this anime is really bad. It sets out to create a mystery and the end result was a faux pas into B-grade territory. Unintelligible and pointless, there is nothing here worth digesting outside of a superficial level. With that being said, I highly suggest you save yourself the trouble and ignore this honking pile of turd.
