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2 people found this review helpful
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25 of 25 episodes seen
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Supernatural mystery. In the episodic format, demon Neuro Nogami drags a highschool girl from murder mystery to murder mystery, solving it easily (often with a deus ex machina from the '777 Tools' - thankfully, there are not actually 777 mysteries in the series) and puppeting the girl to accuse the murderer, who supernaturally transforms into the symbol of their motive and attacks Neuro, who defeats them and 'consumes their mystery' by draining them of life force. The approach is similar to the earlier _Night Walker_ and the later _UN-GO_.
The animation & art are unremarkable and somewhat offputting: very dull flat color palette, blurry washed out animation (despite being from 2007, which is not *that* long ago).
Worse, for a mystery anime, the mysteries are absolutely abysmal. The first episode sets the tone - the instant the assistant chef was pointed out masked by steam, I thought to myself, 'I hope that it's not as trivial as the assistant has been murdered already by the head chef and that's his body propped up to provide an alibi'. It was. The denouement of episode 1 was even more bizarre, as the motive was the head chef was selling drug-laced soup (‽) to perfect 'Doping Consomme Soup' which transforms him into a muscular red giant (‽‽‽). If you don't take it seriously, it was actually somewhat funny, so I wondered if MTNN was going to go for an over the top comedy, but no. The following episodes are the same. The mysteries tend to be rubbish, and to not play fair with the watcher, leading to episodes which are either trivial and can be guessed long before the resolution, or impossible and of little interest, either way, of zero rewatch value. (I don't know why people compare this to _Case Closed_ when all the CC episodes I happen to've watched on Cartoon Network occasionally struck me as much better mysteries than pretty much any MTNN mystery, who has an unfortunate fondness for ropes and frozen things as a mechanism.) Motivations are cursory and implausible, to say the least, and the examination of 'heart' is ill done - it is simply impossible to believe most of these mysteries rather than roll one's eyes.
This might be OK if there was any real chemistry between the characters, but there isn't. Yako eats a lot and gets insulted by Neuro while Akane wiggles on her cellphone. Yeah, we get it.
As dire as the first few episodes are, and I would not blame anyone who watched episode 1 and dropped the series like a hot potato, it does get *slightly* better. The deus ex machinas don't get used as much and Yako takes on more of a role. There are a few nice touches like Yako having nightmares (most detective series neglect that the protagonist is human and would be affected by their work). The mysteries improve slightly, and we see that some of the changes are deliberate and intended to show Neuro becoming weaker and more human, and even some of the weaknesses get attempts at justification - for example, the attempt to rescue all the mysteries' total motive implausibility by appeal to an 'electronic virus' as the first major arc. This first arc did not strike me as satisfactory as it turns into an action-adventure-SF anime but without enough time to develop it or work in any mysteries, and then right after that, the long awaited resolution of the Phantom Thief Sai arc turns out to be... a fight inside a pyramid. We have watched for 25 episodes expecting to find out the mystery of who killed Yako's father, how and why, and at the end we find out.. it was Sai somehow (lol) and it was because his house reminded Sai of his birthplace (‽), oh, and of course Sai escapes. That's it? That's our payoff after 25 episodes of foreshadowing? Talk about a total gyp.
So overall, while it improves over its horrible first few episodes, MTNN never reaches the point where it's worth watching.
The animation & art are unremarkable and somewhat offputting: very dull flat color palette, blurry washed out animation (despite being from 2007, which is not *that* long ago).
Worse, for a mystery anime, the mysteries are absolutely abysmal. The first episode sets the tone - the instant the assistant chef was pointed out masked by steam, I thought to myself, 'I hope that it's not as trivial as the assistant has been murdered already by the head chef and that's his body propped up to provide an alibi'. It was. The denouement of episode 1 was even more bizarre, as the motive was the head chef was selling drug-laced soup (‽) to perfect 'Doping Consomme Soup' which transforms him into a muscular red giant (‽‽‽). If you don't take it seriously, it was actually somewhat funny, so I wondered if MTNN was going to go for an over the top comedy, but no. The following episodes are the same. The mysteries tend to be rubbish, and to not play fair with the watcher, leading to episodes which are either trivial and can be guessed long before the resolution, or impossible and of little interest, either way, of zero rewatch value. (I don't know why people compare this to _Case Closed_ when all the CC episodes I happen to've watched on Cartoon Network occasionally struck me as much better mysteries than pretty much any MTNN mystery, who has an unfortunate fondness for ropes and frozen things as a mechanism.) Motivations are cursory and implausible, to say the least, and the examination of 'heart' is ill done - it is simply impossible to believe most of these mysteries rather than roll one's eyes.
This might be OK if there was any real chemistry between the characters, but there isn't. Yako eats a lot and gets insulted by Neuro while Akane wiggles on her cellphone. Yeah, we get it.
As dire as the first few episodes are, and I would not blame anyone who watched episode 1 and dropped the series like a hot potato, it does get *slightly* better. The deus ex machinas don't get used as much and Yako takes on more of a role. There are a few nice touches like Yako having nightmares (most detective series neglect that the protagonist is human and would be affected by their work). The mysteries improve slightly, and we see that some of the changes are deliberate and intended to show Neuro becoming weaker and more human, and even some of the weaknesses get attempts at justification - for example, the attempt to rescue all the mysteries' total motive implausibility by appeal to an 'electronic virus' as the first major arc. This first arc did not strike me as satisfactory as it turns into an action-adventure-SF anime but without enough time to develop it or work in any mysteries, and then right after that, the long awaited resolution of the Phantom Thief Sai arc turns out to be... a fight inside a pyramid. We have watched for 25 episodes expecting to find out the mystery of who killed Yako's father, how and why, and at the end we find out.. it was Sai somehow (lol) and it was because his house reminded Sai of his birthplace (‽), oh, and of course Sai escapes. That's it? That's our payoff after 25 episodes of foreshadowing? Talk about a total gyp.
So overall, while it improves over its horrible first few episodes, MTNN never reaches the point where it's worth watching.