Normally I’d be praising such unpredictability, but when you put it all together it’s a jumbled mess. None of the stories work together. The magic boy is hunting for someone in the hands of a massive supernatural organization with ties to the government. The detective is hunting a human serial killer who murdered his sister for personal reasons. Completely different enemies with completely different motives. There’s no mesh. And when they do briefly manage to force the storylines together it’s ridiculously contrived. And soon they go their separate ways again, except now they don’t even pretend that they’re connected. This attempted connection leads to some of the worst exposition I’ve ever heard. Both boy and man explain to us the complicated story that takes what looked like an everyday police procedural with superhuman villains (normal!) and takes it straight down the rabbit hole. It’s crazy stuff, made worse for not fitting in with the more serious elements.
With a series this inconsistent characterization is going to suffer too. They’re so busy rewriting the series away from the police procedural setting that they have precious little time to waste on characterization. And just to make the brief linking of the boy and detective stories work they need to make some serious narrative leaps and irrational character choices. The boy Koku never really recovers from this. His backstory is so monumentally stupid that it’s hard to take him seriously once you know it. After some early attempts to expand his character by showing his skill with musical instruments and their repair they drop all personality and just use him as a tool for action scenes. Oh, and he loses any intelligence he may once have had and goes into the final boss fight with the worst battle plan I’ve ever heard.
Detective Keith fares rather better. He’s a sort of cross between L and the entire department of Psycho Pass. A pretty typical loner detective in many ways, he’s rude, direct, sees patterns where nobody else does, and is an absolute failure at everything else. Where he stands out is his puppetmaster qualities and generally detached personality. Somehow it’s less irritating when he does his own thing without explanation than when most anime characters do it. At least he’s convincingly able to act like he has a plan. This doesn’t make his forced backstory any less silly, but he’s always fun to watch regardless. The less said about the villains the better. Their motivations (such as they are) are tied to Koku’s and make no sense at all. Indeed, they could have ended the entire series at the halfway point and it would have made a whole lot more sense.
The art is at least pretty. The series is set in the fictional European nation of Cremonia, an archipelago kingdom of modern cities, medieval castles, and pointy islands. It looks stunning, although I find it rather odd how little they seem to want this. The mid-series battle takes place in a random Buddhist temple and from that point on they seem determined to hide the visuals indoors or in a series of caves. Character design is a mixed bag. I like Keith, who looks a lot more realistic than most anime protagonists (he could step right into an episode of CSI) but I find Koku to be bland and boring, in whatever form he takes. The rest are a mixed bag. Some are good, others are generic. Only the villains stand out as hideously over-the-top. The realistic and exaggerated styles really don’t mix well here. You can actually tell which plot line a character is a part of by their visual style.
Be warned: the series is rather gruesome, with numerous deaths and tortures happening onscreen. It’s a bit exploitative in nature. Oddly, this cruelty doesn’t extent to anyone we actually care about. The show’s surprisingly protective of its leads. Less so the killers, who suffer more deaths due to random murders than they ever do from our heroes.
I did enjoy the first half of the series, before it switched from police procedural to I don’t even know what. The basic dynamics of the police department were interesting and the setting seemed fresh as well. But it quickly burns out its promising elements and tries to fit a lot of irreconcilable elements together into a single plot. If it had just chosen one (Keith’s story ideally) it could have been fine, but they tried to do too many things and ended up undermining themselves. Ah well, at least it’s short.
