Canaan

Canaas is a show with a high overall rating but I disagree.
Plot: the are many ingredients tossed together but unrelated (many characters and elements which you expect to have a role in the story, in the end are nothing more than "empty filling"). If you dont care that much about coherent and complex plots though, then it will still be fine.
As for the characters: in the first episode you will notice that you already know one of the female protagonists from another hundred animés. As for complexity dont expect too much (sort of like Noir). Something I personlly dislike is inconsistency and I found that ... happening with the antagonist, who behaves in a certain way for all the show but then, at the end and with no reason, she acts completely different (if the authors needed that to happen, they should have given a reason to the character for doing so).
I know many who have watched the series will hit the useless review button, but i simply dont care. I write for those who have not watched the series yet, to whom I recommend watching one or two episodes first (especifically if you are interested in plot and character development and complexity).
Thanks for reading.

This show had promise, but it utterly fails to deliver on anything except a couple cool gun fights because all of the characters are utterly terrible. The main characters are mostly lifeless and unengaging, and the villains are so utterly irritating that I could barely bring myself to finish this. Specifically, the villain on camera the most has an onee-san fetish and is constantly screaming and horny; it's extremely offputting (not only because that's inherently offputting, but it also clashes intensely with the serious tone and setting). This show's tone and premise are good, but the characters and writing are just so bad that I ... actively urge you not to watch this.

Just go watch Phantom Requiem for the Phantom instead of this. It's similar in tone and overall feeling but it's better in every single way.

Canaan is simply mediocre in every way. It wasn't ever horrible to watch, but it wasn't ever particularly good either. As opposed to a separated art/sound/character/story type of review, as I often do, I'll just go over some of the good things and the bad things the show did, because doing it by section would get very repetitive in this instance because, again, everything about this show is mediocre.

Some of the stronger points include a straight into the action first episode, heavy action and healthy pacing in the latter part of the show and strong female characters being the focus of the show.

Weak points include ... flat, cookie-cutter characters with little to no development, extremely non-believable/hard to take seriously plot elements and and a completely forgettable soundtrack.

Some plot stuff in particular was just like... come on man... Two egregious examples include when a couple of the main characters return to their hotel room to find it absolutely ripped apart, ransacked and completely covered floor to ceiling in blood. When the hotel staff discovers this, what do they do? They ask them to leave of course! It's ABSURD to believe that a cleaning lady or whatever member of the hotel staff would walk into that room- completely floor to ceiling covered in blood- and not call the police. Hotel management responding to this situation by simply asking the guests to leave is just stupid.

The other is when some of the main characters need to get in a cab as soon as possible so they flag down the first cab driver they can find on the street, which is some random guy they've never met before. This driver then proceeds to drive like a professional stuntman including down alleys that are not roads, down staircases and even up and over a bridge and onto a rooftop. Is that remotely believable? Random Joe Blow cab driver is going to drive like that? It happens only because the plot needs it to happen, but it's just stupid.

There are other similar, smaller examples of things like this but they all ultimately lead to making it very difficult to take the plot remotely seriously.

There are also a couple of scenes that are just super WTF, the most disturbing of which being when a female character decides to get naked and cuddle with at best, more than cuddle with at worst, the corpse of her male love interest. This scene was supposed to be emotionally impactful but it was really gross, really weird and really unnecessary.

At the end of the day Canaan was not the worst or the most boring anime I've ever watched, but it was ultra underwhelming all across the board. I could have lived without watching it this first time around and I can't imagine ever wanting to watch it again. This is definitely among the most forgettable anime I've seen in a while and I wouldn't recommend it.

OBJECTIVE RATING- 6
PERSONAL ENJOYMENT RATING- 5.5-6

On April 28 20XX, the CIA formed a joint operation with Tokyo PD to help resolve a kidnapping case. As you'd imagine, if the CIA are involved, this is pretty serious business. See, the victim of the kidnapping case, Maria Osawa, was injected with the Ua virus and was set loose onto the busy streets of Shibuya.

The Ua virus is particularly deadly, causing the victim to violently bleed out of every orifice after 12-24 hours of infection. You can already imagine the means of transmission if the symptoms are *that* horrific. If they did not find Maria Osawa within this timeframe, the streets of Shibuya ... would be painted in red.

That's all in the past though. Of course, the CIA and Tokyo PD would work together to keep this case away from public light. But to those who did know about these events, they would call it the 428 Shibuya Scramble.

428 Shibuya Scramble is a legendary visual novel and is one of the best that you'll ever read. It leaves an everlasting impression with its writing, the presentation, and its characters.

428 Shibuya Scramble was so good and confident that they featured a special scenario from Type-Moon! This scenario would then get a sequel anime, Canaan!

Canaan on the other hand... isn't good. And I never bothered to compare it to its predecessor. Even though Type-Moon can shit out a well-produced anime, sometimes the shit flies all over the toilet seat. Such is the case with Canaan.

The biggest issue I have with Canaan is that it's simply too campy. It's an anime that's blissfully ignorant, lollygagging along the ghettos of Shanghai while dragging you along for uninteresting ride.

The story revolves around Canaan and Maria Osawa, but you don't need the visual novel pretext. You're not expected to know it either. Cool! What's not cool is literally everything else.

Type-Moon is the only studio to place serious plot points near armpits and butts. They're the only studio to show a no-name idol singing at an Anti-Terrorist Convention that gets taken over by terrorists. All of this feels very loosely written. The lack of cohesion and overload of camp proves that a coherent story isn't a priority. And I didn't mind this, as I have 0 expectations for anything.

For 12 episodes you are thrown through a cat and mouse charade, which is uninteresting because all Type-Moon did was flex their choreography.

Oh, sure. Type-Moon does what they do best, I suppose. In Canaan's case the action still feels lacking because fancy anime military backflips are innately less interesting than an overflow of shiny particle effects. But despite the criticisms, it was still entertaining to watch the eye-candy-laced scenarios unfold.

The characters on the other hand are not interesting. They look strong but end up degrading themselves as all characters search for and display the basic principles of a good anime human. The fact that it isn't grounded in any capacity makes me feel like I'm drowning in this bottomless pool of sentimentality rather than wanting to coddle these cold-blooded apex predators.

In the end, much like the visual novel, the taxi driver is my highlight of the show. Even when he's subjected to anime bullshit, he'll laugh, brush it off, and still give you a ride to the strip club the very next day.

On the other end, I was very disappointed to see the main villain, Alphard, degrade beyond recognition. When subjected to anime bullshit, she quite literally falls off in such a way that nobody could've predicted. She acted crazy cool, but was penultimately weak. Fallen from grace. Truly unbefitting of the mastermind known as Alphard.

And Canaan... ugh. For a show to be THIS centered around her... UGH. 12 episodes to show that stoic apex predators can smile too. There's not much to be said about her since Canaan is a simple girl. The show goes out of its way to reinforce that idea and it wasn't interesting because for 11 episodes she didn't display any hint of any meaningful character development.

In conclusion,

Just another day of cute anime girls smiling, terrorism, and unimportant plot twists in favour of campy feels. There's nothing wrong with any of this, but that toilet seat still needs cleaning. So get to it. 4/10.

Until next time.

No idea how it feels for the anime-only people as usual but it absolutely spoils the origin story of Canaan and Alphard from the visual novel and distorts your perception of better-written characters badly repurposed here, and just the former alone makes me glad I could properly experience it without ruining it with this anime.

It didn't add anything worthwhile to the novel, oversimplified and one could say ruined the characters. What else? The pacing is feeling way too rushed and the story really wants you to either remind you of some of the events of the novel or is really just made for those who ... never read the novel in the first place because the amount of exposition was boring me out of my mind (it is obviously both but it just feels so off). The new characters were entirely uninteresting and the whole premise feels forced just to have a sequel for the novel as promotional material. The ending to Canaan's and Alphard's story was done perfectly in the novel, I'd say, and it's just wasting it all on this thing. I know the Canaan manga or the novel may feel vastly different despite coming out later or even being written at the same time as the production of this anime was underway (like in the case of Evangelion manga), but honestly, Idk if I'd even like it if I read those first but it's my miss, I suppose. Kind of a shame that I can unironically say the best thing about this anime was the opening, but it is what it is.

Search 428: Shibuya Scramble on Steam or something and read the novel instead of watching this. The translation isn't exactly what I would call particularly good, but It's still better than nothing and certainly better than this thing.

Oh boy, where do I start?

Canaan is simply a mess. How messy it is? I'll try to lay it out as brief as possible.

Story: 4

This is my biggest gripe. It's not unfair to say Canaan is half-baked and most likely badly adapted from the source material. The whole premise of the show seem destined to fall apart as the story progressed. If you're looking for plot holes, you don't have to. They'll come to you.

The plot doesn't pick up at least until episode 6. I found it really difficult to get excited to continue the series due to how convoluted and messy the beginning of ... the story is. You'll have to wait until episode 6 to at least get a better glimpse of what Canaan is supposed to be.

Does it get better afterwards? Yes, but not by much that you'll wonder why you decided to spend your precious time on this series. The final two episodes I would say are the most important of all and does give you a bit of satisfaction. If you're a patient viewer who wants to watch this series, get ready to go through the grueling effort of binging first 6 eps.

The action sequences are pretty okay for me. If you're in solely or mainly for the action, I guess you wouldn't be disappointed.


Art: 7

The art style is quite good for a 2009 anime. Not much to say here. Action scenes are animated properly.

Sound: 8

I will say, the OP song is pretty rad. Once you get used to it, watching the subsequent episodes makes you feel more energetic and empowered, probably a good way to counteract the mediocre story.

Character: 4

As with the story, I found myself unable to relate to any of the characters. Some of them are so badly written that removing them from the story altogether wouldn't alter the story by much.

The two main characters, the titular Canaan and Alphard, at least deserves some credit. The final battle between the two during the final 2 episodes was the only part of the story that I liked.

The other characters were bland, boring, had unclear motives, or were simply uninteresting.


Enjoyment: 5

And yet, I still somewhat enjoyed at least the final two episodes where Canaan wraps itself up. Not a bad way to end the series.

Overall: 4

I honestly wouldn't recommend this unless you've ran out of animes to watch. If you can get past the first 6 eps, then I'd say the biggest obstacle has already been cleared. It should be smooth sailing going forward.

tl;dr: An anime that starts off with some good build up but has essentially no solid payoff to anything which is especially disappointing considering how 428 left off.

This anime is a sequel to the visual novel 428: Shibuya Scramble, primarily drawing from the bonus Canaan scenario that was handled by Type-Moon. It isn’t strictly required to have played 428 before watching this from a plot point of view, though I still would heavily recommend doing so as it’s a pretty great VN and this anime spoils essentially all of it pretty much immediately. As such, this review is assuming that the reader has already played ... 428. Considering how high of a note 428 ended on I went into this with pretty high hopes, but ultimately I was pretty disappointed.

The overarching story and world building, what with the Ua virus, Snake, various political factions, etc. I found to be really interesting. I also found the cast of characters conceptually quite interesting. However, ultimately I feel all of this was grossly mishandled and the writing overall was pretty awful. The anime starts off pretty great, featuring Minorikawa and Maria, who is now a photographer, going to Shanghai in search of a major story to report on, at which point they encounter Canaan who is on the trail of Alphard and her terrorist organization Snake. Various other interesting characters are also introduced as well as a number of strange elements that seem to be building up to something involving the Ua virus. At this stage, everything is left pretty mysterious, wherein who most characters are or what they’re trying to do is left ambiguous, but that works pretty well and overall it felt like a pretty gripping atmosphere was created that pulled me into wanting to find out what was really going on and what everything meant.

And as the story goes on things very much do get explained, and as they do things just go further and further downhill. The script was building up a really strong sense of mystery and suspense, but the payoffs to that were pretty much universally completely unsatisfying. The core of that lies in the flow of the narrative and on the completely inability to flesh out the cast. The plot moves forward with various major events occurring and the background that led to everything becoming clear. And I think that from a broad view there was a pretty great plot buried in there. Unfortunately, it felt like the plot was continuously out of focus due to a larger emphasis being placed on focusing on characters with most of the major events that occur just kind of being glossed over and things overall moving way too fast and relying way too much on just straight infodumping or things just happening in the background. There’s a lot of elements that it felt like there was a lot more to and that would have been really interesting to explore, but they just kind of get shown for a scene or two and then just disappear without ever really mattering.

That would always be disappointing due to how it feels like a waste of potential, but it wouldn’t be a deal breaker if the focus on characters bore fruit, but the anime failed in that regard too. Character’s in general are incredibly inconsistent as even when their motivations are revealed their actions still don’t make much sense. It felt like the anime was pushing character arcs for a lot of the main characters, but I don’t think a single one of them was done properly. The ending was full of a lot of monologuing and heavy handed metaphors that pretty much explicitly explained what the character arcs were supposed to be, but even with that, in the context of everything else, the character arcs still don’t make sense or really feel all that worthwhile.

Ultimately I have no clue what the anime was trying to convey with any of the cast and though the script was trying to hit some really strong emotional beats, almost none of them landed. In fact, none at all would have landed if I wasn’t already heavily invested in Maria, Canaan, and Alphard due to 428. With Minorikawa it was kind of the opposite, wherein I don’t think he’s a bad character in this anime, but he’s so different from the Minorikawa in 428 that it feels really off to the point it’s kind of hard to get invested in him and I feel it would have been better to just have had a different character in the role. Anyway, as a result of all this, the ending felt immensely unsatisfying and the anime overall felt pretty pointless.

I would like to note that the comedy in this is surprisingly good when it tries, though as the anime progresses it feels like it’s trying less and less, and due to tonal dissonance even when it’s trying the comedy is landing less and less. I would also like to note that I appreciated the random throwbacks to 428 stuff, wherein the stories of each have surprisingly little to do with each other, it seems to try to throw in cameos of stuff whenever it can, such as with Tama making a grand reappearance and a lot of the cast from Maria and Minorikawa’s stories in 428 having at least some presence, even if it’s just cameos.

The art and animation are pretty great, especially during action scenes. The character designs are pretty great too and it makes pretty good use of them. The soundtrack was also pretty good though none of the tracks were particularly memorable. The OP was pretty great in terms of the song and visuals, though the ED I found only decent in terms of both aspects.