TL;DR
Story: 3/10
Art: 6/10
Sound: 3/10
Character: 5/10
Enjoyment: 7/10
Overall: 5/10
Good points:
+ Exciting, suspenseful throughout
+ Smart and cool main protagonists
+ Good beginning arc
Bad points:
- Poor character growth
- Lousy and annoying antagonists (stop codeswitching between English and Japanese damnit!)
- Lack of character depth
- Lack of any coherent plot whatsoever
- Horrible and unsatisfying resolution
- Poor OP and ED themes
Story: 3/10
For an 11-episode anime, you can't expect any plot deeper than a swimming pool (if you catch my drift), and that's exactly what this plot is like. At the beginning it seems to have some very deep and obscure meaning to it, and in the end, you jump straight into the pool and realize you are only waist-deep. It seems deep initially, but you can hardly even swim, you can only splash around like Magikarp.
The overall plot itself was okay, but none of it made much sense whatsoever. Two kids committing huge acts of terrorism, posting videos of when every bomb will go off and giving a riddle as to the location of the bomb (somewhere in Tokyo). It starts off exciting, that I can give 3 points for, and the suspense and excitement continues throughout the anime. But unfortunately, that's the only thing that this anime offers in terms of plot - suspense, lots of suspense, and excitement. There is some literary appreciation in the discourse of Oedipus, Greek Mythology and other riddle-associated things, but other than that the anime lacks a WHOLE lot of depth. The main motive behind Nine and Twelve's actions seems too small and insignificant for them to be committing so much time and effort to blow things up (and to come up with all those riddles too). They could have easily exposed the truth of their origins via other more humane methods (such as getting evidence - since they are so smart anyway).
The next bad point is the coherence of the plot. Okay, so their goal is to "send a message" to Japan and they target all the areas that are related to the organization which kept them as test subjects. But wait a minute, all of this is literally JUST to make a police officer follow clues to find a similarity between all these targets? The government building, a train, a random building next to a shrine and an airport - all of these owned by some important person in the organisation. I mean, it's just about much easier if you just wrote down the name of the organization at every place you bomb, and you would send a much clearer message - to EVERYONE.
Next, they want to send a message by detonating bombs everywhere, but there's a catch - they vow not to kill a single person? Okay, so you can make everyone evacuate a building, but can you really ensure not a single person is killed when rubble collapses? There are so many scenes in the anime where you see vehicles ENGULFED by the explosion, people running away from falling rubble, INCHES from being crushed. Even on the first attack, they literally had HALF A MIND to KILL LISA who was still in the building! If they were really all that "righteous" and "moral" in nature, why didn't twelve just get LISA to escape in the FIRST PLACE? Nine and Twelve even had the guts to discuss about the merits and demerits of having her alive.
And not forgetting the whole atomic bomb sequence at the end. Okay, so it only caused an EMP wave that's supposed to be harmless and not kill anyone, but wait, there are many people in hospitals all round Tokyo on LIFE SUPPORT! Whoops, just killed them. It's fine, I'm sure they would have opted for euthanasia anyway! And sure you've landed all aircraft in the region, but what about ships? They are basically stranded at sea and the people there face death by starvation. Oh yes, and not to mention all the people at home who are going to DIE OF COLD in the middle of the night because all the thermostats aren't working anymore. Great job guys.
Anyway, another key incoherent part is where you start seeing the US Military/FBI/ISA involvement in all of this. They send their top FBI agent, who somehow HAPPENS to be Five. She just so HAPPENS to be in the FBI after she was taken away from the Athena Project? Sounds pretty unlikely, for a Japanese girl to so quickly rise up ranks in the FBI even if she was prodigy. She shouldn't even be working in a government agency because of her foreign origin.
Not only that, but almost every US involvement scene is ridiculous and full of bullshit. Five and Clarence repeatedly, and I mean repeatedly, enjoy code switching between English and Japanese while TALKING TO EACH OTHER. It's perfectly normal that the switch when they talk to other people, but when they address each other, it's completely UNNATURAL for ANYONE to use both languages simultaneously and without any peculiar reason, other than the fact that the animators like trying their hand at getting the voice actors speak English... uughh!
Next, the US was developing a prototype atomic bomb within Japan. Okay, so HOW did Nine and Twelve know that it was there in the first place? This was never explained. Just because they are really smart doesn't mean they know EVERYTHING?! So now the US wants to intervene after this atomic bomb was stolen. WAIT A SEC, then why didn't they intervene immediately AFTER the bomb was stolen? Why ONLY intervene when this series of terrorist attacks starts happening?
How does the US FBI even get exclusive rights and authority to boss around ALL OF TOKYO's police and security branches in the first place? WHO in his right mind would allow any of this foreign intervention to happen, especially in such a xenophobic place like Japan? Why does the Japanese government not do anything at all whatsoever about US involvement, clearly causing more and more explosions than the terrorists even did? This anime just fails on the logic side on so many levels.
What's more, about Five's plan. Wait a minute, what exactly was Five's plan? Killing Nine? Capturing Nine? Oh wait, I remember, it was about getting the stolen bomb. She really went the round about way of killing her own partner and became obsessed with Nine, playing games with him instead of ever working towards capturing him and locating the bomb.
And the final resolution? Completely bullshit. Random US helicopters fly into Japan airspace without so much as a license, and shoots two innocent civilians down without any backlash from the government, the police and so on. Complete and utter shitty ending. The anime basically spat into my face and said "Screw this plot."
Oh yes, and I forgot about how cliched this whole anime is. Young orphans made test subjects in some secret facility for a secret project, hmm I wonder where I've seen something similar to this before. Oh and wait, they are called by their numbers. I don't suppose one of them would be called number four would you?
Literally, the only thing good about this plot is that it is exciting and suspenseful, nothing else makes any sense what soever, and you cannot take this anime seriously. I give it 3 points for excitement, 0 points for coherence and 0 points for depth.
Art: 6/10
The art for this anime is pretty okay. It has good action scenes, but I felt that many scenes were too unnecessarily dark and it was difficult to see what was going on. Another thing is that there were instances where the camera was shaky in some of the scenes (one with a jet plane shaking off), I'm not sure if that was intentional, but it caused me a bit of dizziness.
Sound: 3/10
Background sounds were good only when there was any action taking place. The OP theme was mediocre, while the ED theme was just bad, plain bad. The background music at the ferris wheel was also very unhelpful and did not suit the theme at all. I'm not sure why they went for the romantic feel, when it was clearly supposed to be a tense/suspenseful moment. The voice actor for Five really should not have tried English. It really wasn't understandable.
Character: 5/10
The main characters were sadly, very underdeveloped. We know abit about their backstory, but not much. How they came from a facility that drugged young kids and made them child prodigies was about all we got about them. Lisa is another quite unknown character. She shows some character growth - changing from a very useless, pathetic girl to a slightly stronger, but still quite pathetic girl. But we know nothing about her past or about why she was even being bullied at school in the first place?
We know that Lisa comes from a broken family but why is it really that she is constantly avoiding her mom? Why is it that she throws her bento set away in a toilet? Why is it that she wants to come home but at the same time doesn't want to come home? What made home so unhomely to her? I know her mum seems crazy in the anime, but at least tell us what the whole problem is rather than just blame it on the "Dad leaves and Mum can't take this world anymore, and takes out her problems on her daughter". Coz this wasn't even mentioned anywhere in the anime.
Next, the antagonists, Five and Clarence, have even less backstory to them. Five, we know, came from the same facility, but all that we know is that she was the "sole survivor" of the lot. We don't really know why she didn't manage to escape when Twelve and Nine both did. She wants vengeance on Nine just because she couldn't win him in chess? Or at any other game? Cmon, stop being a childish nuisance in this anime. The US intervention completely ruined this anime and made it so complicated, that the characters themselves don't know how to react in any of those situations.
Twelve and Nine do show some signs of growth, but very little. Twelve stays the way he is - cheerful and silly, whilst Nine stays serious, moody and cool.
The most interesting character, Shibasaki, knows nothing about atomic bombs but knows a lot about Oedipus Rex and the story behind it. He is a badass cop who stops at nothing to solve the crimes that come his way, and he has a pretty loyal gang of people around him (who literally just met him in the anime, now that doesn't make much sense). He goes on to defy his superiors for justice and saves many innocent lives because of his virtues. But he has a dark backstory too, and was demoted because of a suicide of a person he knew, which he insisted was not a suicide, but vowed to get down to the bottom of it. Luckily for us, he gets his answer somewhere to the end of an anime with a rather unprecedented twist, which was more convenient than surprising.
The character cast is interesting, but not varied enough, and many characters were one-sided in nature. The character development and growth was also much lacking in this anime. 3 points for having 3 rather interesting characters. 1 point for character growth and 1 point for trying to provide some semblance of a backstory. I'm trying to be generous here.
Enjoyment: 7/10
I can't say that I didn't enjoy this anime at all. But this horrible plot completely destroyed my expectations when I watched it. The touching scenes were not touching at all, and I literally laughed my ass off when I saw Twelve and Nine operating this crane thing next to a runaway airplane. I was surprised that this anime was not made a comedy, because it probably could have had higher ratings if it had more comic element inside.
The pacing of the anime is quite good though, there were no points where I felt completely bored out. I was just completely dumbfounded at how stupid the plot could get and how convenient it was for the characters to be there at the right time, and somehow have the right equipment for the job. Still, at least it was enjoyable enough in terms of the suspense and actions scenes to keep watching, even though I knew this anime would end badly. Really badly.
Concluding comments:
This anime should only be watched if you literally have no other anime to watch. Just killing time, basically. It offers little plot depth, little development and growth, and is waaay less revolutionary than the author thinks it is. It's also highly overrated, I feel, on this website.
