Ergo Proxy

Within the domed city of Romdo lies one of the last human civilizations on Earth. Thousands of years ago, a global ecological catastrophe doomed the planet; now, life outside these domes is virtually impossible. To expedite mankind's recovery, "AutoReivs," humanoid-like robots, have been created to assist people in their day-to-day lives. However, AutoReivs have begun contracting an enigmatic disease called the "Cogito Virus," which grants them self-awareness. Re-l Mayer, the granddaughter of Romdo's ruler, is assigned to investigate this phenomenon alongside her AutoReiv partner, Iggy. But what begins as a routine investigation quickly spirals into a conspiracy as Re-l is confronted by humanity's darkest sins.

Elsewhere in Romdo, an AutoReiv specialist by the name of Vincent Law must also face his demons when surreal events begin occurring around him. Re-l, Iggy, Vincent, and the child AutoReiv named Pino will form an unlikely faction as they struggle to uncover Romdo's mysteries and discover the true purpose of the mythical beings called "Proxies."

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Mayer, Re-l Main

Saitou, Rie Japanese

Pino Main

Yajima, Akiko Japanese

Law, Vincent Main

Yusa, Kouji Japanese

Ergo Proxy Main

Yusa, Kouji Japanese

Iggy Supporting

Mizuuchi, Kiyomitsu Japanese

Creed, Raul Supporting

Hanada, Hikaru Japanese

Yumeno, Daedalus Supporting

Kobayashi, Sanae Japanese

Proxy, Monad Supporting

Kojima, Sachiko Japanese

One, Proxy Supporting

Ootsuka, Houchuu Japanese

Proxy, Kazkis Supporting

Inoue, Kazuhiko Japanese

Matsuda, Akio Producer

Kouchiyama, Takashi Producer

Murase, Shukou Director, Episode Director, Storyboard, Key Animation, Animation Director

Momose, Keiichi Sound Director

Reviews

Mar 29, 2025

MichaelMorbius

Recommended

It doesn't matter who made you, what goals you're told to pursue, it doesn't matter how sad life can be, you're a human being. No matter how fucked up things get, you're a human being. With a heart, a soul and therefore you need to live. Shit will happen and it will lead to good stuff. After all you need to have loss in order to have love.
That's my main takeaway from one of most complex animes I've ever seen: Ergo Proxy.
A surreal yet magical experience that trescendes animation and make you wonder who are you and why. One of the finest pieces on animation ... I've graced my eyes upon.

Plot: 9/10 - The story takes a place in a post-apocalyptic setting, in the dome-city of Rumdeau. It follows the stories of Vincent Law, an immigrant who seems to have lost his memories, and Re-L Meyer, a detective who encounters a creature known as "Proxy" that changes her life. In the meantime a virus known as "Kogito" infects the AutoReivs, robots that are given the role of entourage to people in Rumdeau, casing them to stop following the orders of their masters after developing a soul. They'll often cause havoc as would lose their raison d'etre, that is following the orders of their masters. As the journey goes on we discover more and more about these and all the characters in the show, leading to the ultimate truth behind the creation of Proxys, dome-cities while also putting us in front of serious matters such as "would I still be happy, if I knew the truth?" or "what it means to be alive, what it's our purpose?".
The plot tends to be convicted at times but never tideous. Every question is answered by the end of the show. And, most importantly, the show made you ask questions about the characters, the truth behind certain things, and, dare I say, forces you to deal with your own self having to deal with matters such as who are you and what's you rasion d'etre.
It's intriguing, engaging and rewarding to follow. The show never drags despite the topics treated and the episodes themselves really flow by, unlike Technolyze (an anime that's often named alongside Ergo Proxy) whose episode were tedious to follow at times.

Characters: 9/10 - Vincent and Re-L are two awesome MCs. Vincent's constat seek of the truth about himself is great and I loved how Re-L went from being a puppet of manufactured society she lives in to embarking on a crazy journey to find the truth, allowing her to change her view on the world. Characters like Pino and Paul were also great. Paul's descent spiral into madness after having lost his loved ones is sad to witness and Pino's just a lovely and cute supporting character. Shoutout to Iggy's small character arc too, really well done.
All the character are captivating and their personalities are well crafted. They have goals, motivations and are driven. They're great overall.

Animation: 8/10 - I'll forever love this early-2000s animes and their dark vibes and sad tones. Death Note, Technolyze, Monster, ecc...
The atmosphere is great throughout the whole thing and the animation's really well done. Sometimes the faces look really weird, which was quite off-putting, but it's nothing to talk about too harshly. The world build is great and the characters' designs are awesome. The Proxys look cool as fuck.

Soundtrack: 9/10 - The opening is goated, among the best one I've heard, and the rest of the soundtrack slaps too. Great, great work.

Overall enjoyment: 9/10 - A complicated yet rewarding ride that it's thrilling and never tiring and that forces you to deal with important themes. One of the best animes I've ever seen by a long shot.

Reviewer’s Rating: 9

What did you think of this review?

Nice 0

Love it 0

Funny 0

Confusing 0

Informative 0

Well-written 0

Creative 0

More reviews by MichaelMorbius (22)

Show all

Read more

Show less

Open

Gift

Report

Sep 21, 2025

RemanTheArchean

Mixed Feelings

I'm giving this a 7/10, but this is not a typical 7/10 show where my thoughts would be that it's decent enough to be fun as I'm watching it, but that it's nothing special. Rather, this is an *extremely* ambivalent 7/10 indicating that I think this show hits more than it misses, but man did it get on my nerves at some points.

This is an extremely pretentious show from start to finish. It seems like whoever created this had a goal to "show that anime can be just as worthwhile as any other medium", sort of like if Ghost in the Shell got a ... full 23 episodes to flex itself rather than <90 minutes. One one hand this is a good thing since many anime are just utterly unambitious, but on the other hand this really overdoes it at some points.

My biggest issue was in just trying to understand what's going on. This show involves a lot of mysteries that eventually get answered, but in the first episode we're just dumped into the story in medias res, and Ergo Proxy really doesn't seem to care if we're managing to follow along. At some level I can respect not belaboring simple plot points like some anime do, but if a show is too reticent with details then it can become disorienting. This show definitely veers hard towards underexplaining, and at times almost seems blatantly obscurantist. I'd say nearly half of the dialogue is either riddles, philosophical gibberish, or both. We get quotes like “It’s not ‘I think, therefore I am.’ It’s ‘I think, therefore you are.'" I'm sure people can do something similar to what Youtubers do for Dark Souls item descriptions, weaving a coherent narrative out of the small patchwork we actually get to see. But watching this firsthand is just aggravating at times. It's like someone took a word salad of famous philosophers, existentialism, solipsism, metaphysics, and put it all in a blender called the 2deep4u 3000 and sprayed it all over the walls.

I was unsure how to watch this show. It was very unclear to me whether gaps in my knowledge were due to my own inattentiveness, or if they would be mysteries that were revealed later. It didn't help that there can be big jumps between episodes. Watching them back-to-back on a streaming service in 2025 as opposed to once a week on TV made me feel like I was accidentally skipping entire episodes. I'd start the next episode where they'd be a completely different situation, and I'd be left wondering "wait, how did they get here???". I vacillated on whether I should look up episode details on the wiki to ground myself a bit at the risk of spoilers, or if I should just lay back and vibe with the show in a state of semi-obliviousness. I went the "vibing" route for the first 8 episodes or so. The show is OK like this -- it does a good enough job in the cinematography and the characters that I found it pleasant enough, although it was of course let down somewhat by the fact that I didn't have a clue what some scenes were about. Eventually I gave up and started looking up details, which let me have a solid grasp on what was going on, although it cost me through some spoilers. I found that there was still too much vagueness for me to really enjoy the overarching plot even when I did finally start to understand. In the end, I'm not sure what I should have done. It seems like at least some of the vagueness is there to get you to rewatch it, but I don't like feeling forced to do that. A show should be at least a 90% complete package on the first run through, but this felt closer to 70%.

Re-l is a charismatic protagonist. I mean, she's clearly a total bitch, but she's still interesting to watch. I'm sure some people like her simply for being a hot goth chick with blue eye shadow, but the animation style made her look frumpy and awkward about half the time in my eyes. What I really enjoyed was her driven, relatively calm demeanor -- it reminded me a lot of Serie from Frieren. Vincent is far less charismatic. Just a typical Joe Average protagonist in terms of personality, he's arguably the real protagonist which is disappointing. He's constantly whining and complaining, which is obviously justified given his predicament, but which is still annoying to watch. Pino is alright. I normally don't like kid characters, but she kind of grew on me.

The cinematography is quite good, although it can go overboard like every other part of the show. There's an artful use of "camera" angles to drive in the emotional undertones of scenes, and I found the presentation to be enjoyable a majority of the time. That said, a few scenes were so dark I could hardly tell what was going on. There's also a lot of close-ups and weird angles. A bit of that to make a point can improve a show, but Ergo Proxy overuses it to the point of parody. Many episodes feature a single proxy serving as the antagonist, and they each have their own special power. It just happens that almost all of the proxies have powers that coincidentally manifest as the ability to cause severe hallucinations, which the show's creators then use to go down whatever rabbithole they wanted to. Sometimes that's just an artsy mindfuck episode with lots of abrupt camera cuts, while other times we do a full genre-shift and become a Saturday morning cartoon or a goofy game show.

In fact, the game show of episode 15 encapsulates my feeling of this series as a whole. It comes out of nowhere, as episode 14 ended on a completely different note. Looking back, the point of the episode is to serve as the lore-dump of what happened to humanity, why the world is post-apocalyptic, the backstory behind the proxies, etc. Bad shows would tell you all this with a character just doing a bland straightforward explanation. Good shows would show rather than tell, probably with a detailed flashback. Ergo Proxy chooses neither option, and instead goes completely batshit crazy with a hallucinatory game show, and then tries to slide in the relevant details as trivia questions. This is the type of thing I appreciate more in hindsight than when I was watching it. It wasn't *awful*, but the execution was a little over the top and I was a bit exhausted by that point of the other crazy tricks the show had been pulling.

Reviewer’s Rating: 7

What did you think of this review?

Nice 0

Love it 0

Funny 0

Confusing 0

Informative 0

Well-written 0

Creative 0

More reviews by RemanTheArchean (52)

Show all

Read more

Show less

Open

Gift

Report

Jan 20, 2024

MxS7HGS

Not Recommended

Ergo Proxy has a lot of issues. It's hard to know where to start. One of the main problems is that it's too similar to Ghost in the Shell: Innocence. Both stories are weak and are mainly there to distract from the flaws with dazzling visuals. It starts off well but quickly becomes tedious and slow. It tries too hard to be intelligent and ends up being annoying.

The first episode is excellent, and it looks amazing. It hooks you in, but unfortunately, the rest of the story is slow and doesn't have much momentum. There are too many episodes where one character just talks to ... themselves about their identity, and this drags on for too long. The plot is revealed in unrelated episodes, which is confusing. The ending raises more questions than answers.

The characters are not developed well enough. The relationships are explored, such as Vincent's struggles and his dynamic with Re-l, but they feel rushed. Pino provides comic relief, but her dialogue can be annoying.

The animation is the best part. It looks great, especially the cyberpunk and gothic elements. However, the characters' designs are inconsistent, which can be distracting, and the secondary male characters look too similar.

The soundtrack is unusual and fits the show's aesthetic, but it's repetitive, and the same few songs are played throughout.

Overall, Ergo Proxy is a disappointment. The first episode is good, but the rest is not worth watching. The animation and soundtrack are commendable, but the story and characters are weak.

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

What did you think of this review?

Nice 0

Love it 0

Funny 0

Confusing 0

Informative 0

Well-written 0

Creative 0

More reviews by MxS7HGS (117)

Show all

Read more

Show less

Open

Gift

Report

Must-Watch Original Anime Series

by kizumi91

50 Entries · 670 Restacks

2025 anime watch list

by mostyda0992

41 Entries · 30 Restacks

depression

by NootsTheBerkMan

25 Entries · 4 Restacks

North American Anime & Manga Releases for August

Here are the North American anime & manga releases for August Week 1: August 7 - August 13 Anime releases Black Clover Part 1 Blu-ray & DVD Combo Digimon Adv...read more

Aug 6, 2018 2:33 PM by Sakana-san | Discuss (0 comments)

North American Anime & Manga Releases for November

Here are the North American anime & manga releases for November Week 1: November 1 - 7 Anime Releases Akagami no Shirayuki-hime Complete Collection Blu-ray &...read more

Oct 31, 2016 3:34 PM by Sakana-san | Discuss (8 comments)

	Poll: Ergo Proxy Episode 23 Discussion ( 1 2 3 4 5 ... Last Page ) BUD - May 19, 2008	330 replies	by sh4d0wkN1Gh7 »» Sep 15, 2:11 AM
	Poll: Ergo Proxy Episode 20 Discussion ( 1 2 3 4 ) Ranivus - Jun 23, 2008	153 replies	by Cain_Virethorn »» Sep 5, 12:03 AM
	Poll: Ergo Proxy Episode 19 Discussion ( 1 2 3 4 ) Metty - May 28, 2008	185 replies	by LunaLov »» Sep 4, 4:11 PM
	Poll: Ergo Proxy Episode 17 Discussion ( 1 2 ) Ranivus - Jun 23, 2008	91 replies	by LunaLov »» Sep 4, 2:41 PM
	Poll: Ergo Proxy Episode 22 Discussion ( 1 2 ) Ranivus - Jun 24, 2008	94 replies	by Cain_Virethorn »» Sep 3, 11:13 PM

12 Complex Psychological Anime to Wrap Your Head Around

In a genre with anime of various types ranging from action to sports, these are the psychological anime that will actually challenge you and the way you think.

by MAL_Articles

278,326 views

Top 20 Best Sci-Fi Anime of All Time

So what's this genre all about anyway? Complex formulas and futuristic, science-y stuff? Well, only some of the time. Check out our list to find out!

by madokamage

547,272 views

Spoiler

CollectionSci-fi