B: The Beginning

On the islands of Cremona, a vigilante runs amok. Celebrated by some and hunted by others, the notorious "Killer B" takes justice into his own hands, armed with a sharp blade and superhuman abilities. Unable to apprehend this renegade, the Royal Investigation Service (RIS) calls upon the expertise of Keith Flick, a seasoned, yet eccentric detective who was relegated to the Archives Department following a personal loss. As crimes in Cremona begin to escalate, from stealthy executions of wrongdoers to sophisticated strikes on public figures, it soon becomes clear that there is more than one person responsible.

With the help of his impulsive sidekick Lily Hoshina, and unexpected aid from the elusive Killer B himself, Keith begins to unravel plots involving secret organizations, domestic terrorism, and human experiments. When the involvement of the RIS extends beyond the scope of justice, the extent of the government's corruption—as well as the trustworthiness of close allies—are thrown into question.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Kazama Flick, Keith Main

Hirata, Hiroaki Japanese

Kokuu Main

Kaji, Yuuki Japanese

Hoshina, Lily Main

Seto, Asami Japanese

Izanami Supporting

Saiga, Mitsuki Japanese

Yuna Supporting

Satou, Satomi Japanese

Ross, Gilbert Supporting

Morikawa, Toshiyuki Japanese

Yoshinaga, Kaela Supporting

Koshimizu, Ami Japanese

Minatsuki Supporting

Ishikawa, Kaito Japanese

Kirisame Supporting

Terashima, Takuma Japanese

Laica Supporting

Kitada, Yuu Japanese

Kuroki, Rui Producer

Yagi, Masako Producer, Production Manager

Nakazawa, Kazuto Director, Episode Director, Storyboard, Key Animation, Original Creator, Character Design, Animation Director, Chief Animation Director

Yamakawa, Yoshiki Director, Episode Director, Storyboard, Animation Director, Key Animation

Reviews

Mar 2, 2018

RebelPanda

Recommended

It’s so rare to see an anime of such high quality to take as many risks as B: The Beginning does. Sure it stumbles a bit along the way, but the final result is undeniably an ambitious and thoroughly entertaining ride worth watching.

The story is totally insane on paper but is somehow even more bewildering in action thanks to such lovingly crafted visuals by Production I.G. with a talented director at the helm. It is in one part a sci-fi police procedural similar to Psycho-Pass, but simultaneously a game of cat and mouse like Death Note. These wild ideas packed on top of each ... other in only a brief 12 episode season makes for slightly underdone execution and lacking development. In my opinion, there’s enough good in this show to outweigh the negatives, but to summarize them before diving into the analysis:

Pros:
+Fantastic Action Scenes
+Great Animation
+Expressive Dub and Good Soundtrack
+Likable Characters
+Shocking Twists that add Rewatch Value
+Emotional Conclusion

Cons:
-Underdone Sci-Fi Setting
-Large Cast of Supporting Characters are Underdeveloped
-Too Fast-Paced at Times
-Confusing Story at First

To start I’ll say, B: The Beginning is a thriller with plenty of twists and turns in its story to keep you interested. It’s not really a traditional mystery because (like Death Note) the titular ‘Killer B’ that the title alludes to is revealed in the first episode and is one of our two protagonists. One being the enigmatic Koku with his black wings and nack for murdering criminals; the other is Keith Flick a gruff former detective who’s helping out the police hunt down killer B. He’s sort of inept in social situations which derives plenty of comedy that I found quite funny. Keith's intelligence makes him a perfect lead to see this investigation from. Whenever he’s in deep thought putting the pieces of a mystery together we see his thoughts visibly through words and diagrams that appear onscreen. It’s all quite neat as well, not cluttering the screen and conveying his organized mind. He even has a tragic backstory to complement his gruff design which ties into the story and is revisited before the end to give him a satisfying conclusion to his character arc.

Our second protagonist, the teenage Koku struggles to maintain relevance until his backstory is fleshed out during the second half. Keith gets the majority of the screen time of the two. All of the characters have some level of charm making them all quite watchable, excluding Koku. He’s just an angsty teenager with black-wings and an arm that turns into a sword… yeah my interest in him was only maintained by his mysterious origin. That origin takes an intruiging shape and justifies all of the insanity we see up until then in an extremely satisfying twist. I found Koku alienating at first, but he proved to be a crucial part of the story as it went on. While I couldn't entirely get invested in his subdued personality, at least I understood why he was so subdued. His backstory and to a greater extent the show's whole story became a mystery I didn't expect to be engaged with but I loved it. I would definitely rewatch this show to understand it with the knowledge of the twists. It was a huge risk making an experience that relies so heavily on ambiguity, thankfully it worked out because the twists are so rewarding.

My favorite member of the supporting cast, Lily stands out with her sarcastic, defiant, and irreverent personality. Working alongside Keith, her lack of experience gives the audience a simpler and more comprehensive perspective on the potentially alienating first half. Her separate scenes were a joy to watch, never hurting the show's overall dark tone. I do wish that she and the other supports had more visible development by the end. At least the protagonists grow a sufficient amount thanks to their backstories being woven into the story.

Throughout the first half of the show, a criminal group creates havoc throughout the show’s fictional sci-fi country Cremona. Sadly the setting becomes little more than an afterthought because the main focus of the show is the game of cat and mouse. Just like the detective Keith and his fellow investigators, we are left in the dark on what exactly is happening in the terror-filled nation of Cremona and why. It's an effective way to immerse us in their struggle to find the truth and put an end to the violent chaos. We get information on the terrorist group as the police do, it rarely feels like the audience is ahead of Keith’s knowledge. Unless of course, we’re seeing the story through Koku’s eyes as he’s fighting at the heart of the cacophony.
Mostly populated by thrilling action sequences, the first half spares very little time on developing the many police officers due to the quick pacing. Instead the talented Kazuto Nakazawa gives us recognizable character designs (oh lord especially the clown makeup cultists), strong English voice performances, and a punchy script that gives the cast enough personality to not be cardboard cutouts fighting a pointless battle. While I did find myself caring about the characters when their lives were threatened, I can’t guarantee everyone else will like their charm. Once the pace settles in the second half, development does come quite plentifully with huge twists that validate the madness seen in the first half. There’s plenty of rewatch value after understanding why the first half is so filled with ambiguity. There's even a teaser at the end of the last episode indicating a potential second season. Even though the story wraps up really well, I'd love to watch another season of it.

Jumping sporadically from one catastrophe to the next, the story showcases Production I.G.’s best abilities. CGI vehicles shake with realistic physics during the many entertaining car chase scenes. The camera is always placed right at the center of the action, never shying away from an abundance of violence, never afraid of blowing its budget on the spectacle. The creator/director Kazuto Nakazawa known for good animation work on series like Samurai Champloo has finally been given a project worthy of his talent. This is the only anime that I can say has a clown makeup wearing cultist skateboarding down the side of a skyscraper while being chased by a black-winged vigilante teenager. All with beautifully fluid animation at high speeds. If that's not ambitious, then I don't know what is.
Most of all, the background art is always well detailed, sometimes breathtaking. Even if those backgrounds don’t necessarily have details that flesh out the setting much more than ‘it looks pretty much like modern-day America’, they still look damn great.

B: The Beginning may have a confusing and fast-paced first half, with a poorly explained setting and a lack of villain motivations, but at least it’s never boring. Not one bit.

The villains eventually do get explained motivations (and the clown makeup actually makes sense!) but it does come in a twist so you’ll have to find out the answers for yourself! Getting to those motivations will mean you’ll have to get through the bewildering first half, but don’t worry! And besides, the sword duals are so amazing during the early episodes. It’s constant fluidly animated, sakuga that will grab your attention where the writing may not. But like I said before, after watching it I can say confidently there is a reason for everything that happens early on, even if it's confusing for a first time viewer.

On top of the great visuals, the sound design is also spectacular. Everything from the slice of a sword, whirring car engines heard as they drive by, and explosions with intense audiovisual feedback. It’s so impactful at every moment. Even when there isn’t a satisfying sound effect playing, the perfectly cerebral thriller soundtrack is reverberating. The ending song “The Perfect World” is amazing too, performed by Marty Friedman with Man With A Mission’s quite talented vocalist.

It’s common for people to criticize edginess in dark and violent anime like this one. It definitely lives up to the shows that inspired it, but does it break out of the overbearing edginess we’re used to seeing in this Crime-Thriller genre? In my opinion, absolutely. There’s enough comic relief separated from the high stakes action to make the characters seem like real people, not just pawns in a to be moved by the writer. There's an overall silliness that covers much of it, but it knows when to be serious. However, nothing is spared from the craziness that B loves to employ. It's everywhere; from the absurd hacking sequences with foot pedals (for what reason, I don't know!) to the to its occasionally hilarious cast. Also, the cultists' uniform makeup also helps them seem less like a feared undefined entity and more like mentally disturbed clowns that you’d want to run from if you ever saw on the streets. It's a ride, a really fun time that isn't afraid to get its hands dirty and only tries to entertain.

Score Breakdown:
[Story: 5/10] A rollercoaster that takes it’s time to get going, but it makes for great entertainment.
[Character: 5/10] Likable but not much to them.
[Art: 8.5/10] All around great, relatively tame towards the end.
[Sound: 9/10] Solid dub and soundtrack. Mediocre sub.
[Enjoyment: 8/10] Confusing at first, becomes more engaging as it goes.

[Overall Score: 7/10]
It's all too rare for us to get a high budget anime like B: The Beginning that takes so many risks to create a unique and memorable experience. Thankfully those risks paid off and it turned out really good. It's far from perfect, but I'm just happy such a lovingly crafted experience like this got made at all. This is the kind of uncommonly crazy anime that I thoroughly enjoyed, but I'm glad not everything is the same as it.

Reviewer’s Rating: 7

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Mar 3, 2018

Arachnophobic

Mixed Feelings

Before watching:

Damn, this show has a really good OP! Hopefully the show lives up to it. And the PV makes it seem like it'll be a nice crime thriller.

After watching:

Okay, thanks for The Perfect World, which was apparently the ED, but I want my 5 hours back. No one told me this was Botched: The Beginning.

I wanted to like this show, I really did. I want the new shows coming out on Netflix to do justice to the medium, since they'll be available to a wide global audience who aren't exposed to anime. I wouldn't say it didn't keep me engaged throughout, but overall my ... impression is definitely negative, and I would recommend most people to give it a miss. I'll try and sum up why.

This show has a severe identity crisis. It doesn't know what it wants to be, and tries to be many things at once - throwing one idea after another, hoping that it sticks, but failing to execute even a single one of them well. It's what you get when you throw Psycho Pass, Tokyo Ghoul and Darker than Black in a grinder and try to shape resulting slop into a plot.

It was an utter mess in terms of writing. There was little cohesion between the two major plot threads and within them, not much sensibility, no semblance of an underlying message or theme, and it didn't sell any of the characters well enough to make me worry about them, except one spunky detective who reminded me a little of Akane from Psycho-Pass. Otherwise, the cast consists of:

1) Bad Sherlock rip-off who uses calculus to solve crimes somehow
2) Bargain-bin Serial Killer with standard mental issues
3) Emo teen with powers who wants to save (4)
4) Damsel in distress
5) Emo teen #2 who hates (3) and steals (4)
6) Hacker lady who likes to add pedals to her computer setups.. for the boost?

There were some more characters, all inconsequential.

5/10 overall, and it's not a 4 because of the good production values that were consistent throughout the show, and a genuinely great dub.

Needless to say I won't be tuning in for the sequel, unless it's somehow hailed as the saviour of anime. It's not possible to even retroactively fix this mess of a plot.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Mar 4, 2018

-Rainy-

Not Recommended

B: The Beginning combines two separate stories within each other, one of supernatural mystery and one with a detective searching for a murderer. The fundamental problem with the show is that both stories suck ass and don’t really connect together at all. You could rather easily cut out one of these plot lines from the entire narrative and not lose that much in terms of story quality in the other. Hell, the show may be better for it. So, don’t even read the rest of this review, just write the show off based on the word of one internet stranger alone. Trust me, I’m ... the only internet stranger that matters.

I hate when reviews talk about the meaty stuff first and then mention the audiovisuals at the end in much shorter detail, so we’re going to escalate in our meaty bonanza. The production values for this show are great. B: The Beginning does not have any dips in quality, it is consistently good looking and sometimes better than that for its entire run. While not specifically my aesthetic, the visuals are certainly strong, and the animation is quite good the entire show. Kazuto Nakazawa has many important seats visual wise, as the chief animation director, character designer, director in general, and original creator of the show. Other shows he’s had influence on visual wise that you may have heard of are Zankyou no Terror and Samurai Champloo, so if you loved the visuals in those shows, this may be worth a shot for you.

Sound wise, this show is pretty underwhelming. The soundtrack isn’t of poor quality but binging through the entire show it was easy to notice they were just playing the same couple of tracks over and over again per episode, which got grating. This show does have a cool ending theme song as well, though the visuals for it aren’t noteworthy.

I’ll be frank; the supernatural plot of B: The Beginning is a pile of cockshit, getting bad quickly and never recovering. The premise, is that we have “Killer B” who is a non human creature with insane powers. He has wings, his arm can turn into a sword, he has an edgy anime left eye, his skin turns black when he starts fighting people, and has regenerative powers. This part of the show is about him, and the mythos of his species. This isn’t a bad premise on its own although it isn’t especially unique, but fun things could be done with it! Sadly, B: The Beginning does not do anything fun with this. Instead it goes into the most basic direction imaginable in every shape and form. I felt like I had vietnam flashbacks to every anime I’ve ever watched while finding out about this character’s backstory. I don’t mind if a show isn’t unique as long as it is executed in an appealing way, and this show very much does not execute this aspect in an appealing way. In order to do that, I’d need to care about the characters, because every single character in the supernatural plot did not matter to me, including the most important character, Killer B a.k.a Koku. Koku’s entire character basically revolves around the “tragedy” of what happened to him when he was a child and his girlfriend Yuna. When bad things happen to Yuna, he gets mad and yells like the shounen boy he is. He has nothing else going on so his character gets incredibly annoying being on screen so much when he is so uninteresting. Speaking of Yuna, she is a prime example of how this show can not write female characters very well. She is just Koku’s girlfriend and the damsel in distress. She doesn’t have her own character, her own motivations, nor does she do anything of importance in the story. She is just a macguffin, that is her entire character. The other chucklefucks, are all completely inconquestial to everything that it is kinda laughable. Pretty much every single one of the supernatural characters in this show is a stereotypical edgy anime crazy person, and all of them get taken out with little fanfare. Even an antagonist that remained in the shadows and slowly had intrigue building up for his encounter with the main character, ended up not mattering at all. Only one of these characters is an actual threatening adversary to the main character, but he isn’t given enough time or personality to leave an impact on the viewer.

Now, the other half of B: The Beginning is a story about Keith Flick hunting down the criminal that murdered someone close to him, and the bonds he has with the people in his life. While this side of B: The Beginning is better than everything related to Koku, it isn’t good by any stretch. The police force have some fun personalities in them, most notably Hoshino Lily, but they don’t leave much of an impact at all. Keith himself is just an eccentric genius character and this is shown to the audience in a terrible way, because the show doesn’t actually know how to represent this so it just throws bullshit at you. Keith solves the answer to a certain problem in episode 1 after writing a bunch of mathematical gibberish on a board, which is not the only the time that the show attempts to make him look smart despite the staff having little idea on how to present a character that actually is as smart as Keith. I found him quite dull. The main villain of this story line isn’t very good either. The show takes too long to start delving into his mindset and motivations that by the time it even attempted to do any fleshing out of the character my patience had already been worn out. Kaela, a side character, is similar to Keith in that they are supposed to be crazy good at something, but the show doesn’t know how to show it. She is the classic hacker dude of the group. She has a bunch of monitors, four fucking keyboards, that's right, four keyboards, weird foot pedals for some reason, you get the gist. Again, it is all just bullshit. Lily is the single most engaging character in the show due to her spunky personality, but the show doesn’t use her as much as they should have. In the finale she is just a tool for the last section of this storyline instead of getting to do something on her own. Like I said earlier in the review, this show does not write its female characters very well. While I don’t think the male characters are any good either, the writing and presentation of the female characters is fairly sexist. It isn’t to an extreme amount, but it is still a detriment to the show.


B: The Beginning… is pretty bad. haHAA get it, cause of the letter B bayBEEEE. I honestly regret ever watching a single episode of anime in my life.

Reviewer’s Rating: 2

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