It is pretentious shit, you will learn nothing useful, you will not find anything but boredom. If I could I would give this 0 points, this anime is a total waste of time.
You don’t have to believe me, you may still want to start this anime. But when you feel the cringe level rising after 2 or more episodes come back to the spoiler section as no, it will not get better.
The voice acting, music and drawing style are reasonably fine, but the action scenes are non-existent, you always arrive afterwards. This might be good enough for a detective show, but after the first episode the anime is chasing a protagonist and it doesn’t work. There is also a lot of talking, 90% is talking going nowhere. Making it sound important and complex talking, but it really is not. In the end the anime is a simple childish script to make a dumb point. Whatever they say is mostly not shown nor has any real relevance in the anime.
[spoilers warning]
The main storyline is the adopting of a suicide law, and if suicide is bad or not.
Suicides are messy things, and laws cannot really forbid them. Existing suicide laws make it possible that people can end their lives in a painless civil way. There are requirements of course. Doctors and psychologists have to agree to it and they first check if you can be helped to live further.
But that is not researched in this anime, a requirement free law is demanded by letting people jump off of buildings. Democracy at work I’m guessing. The only argument against that law is that everyone will commit suicide on a whim, o the horror being alive really sucks. They act like a lot of people don’t do it because it’s not in the law.
The anime story show people committing suicide by jumping and shooting, which are not good ways to go. Someone has to clean the remains, imagine brains, intestines everywhere not to mention the smell. Shooting as shown in the anime is also bad as some people do survive this and end up blind. If you really want to talk about suicide - show the viewers that bloody part, that is what anime is for. Make the characters react on the view. And say without the law you get this bloody mess.
But the characters hardly react to the suicides, no one is really shocked or it goes away fast. People die, but no one is arrested because suicide is your own will of course. In this anime world, a sect leader could just do whatever they want and never be convicted.
The characters don’t feel real either, Seizaki Zen is portrayed as a good loving husband and a good colleague. But we never see him go home and have some good time with his family. Itsuki Kaika wants the suicide law so he can commit suicide to save his son. How his son feels about that is never explored, the “best dad ever” emotion should collide with “oh no daddy gone forever” emotion. His son goes with his question on the internet that’s all. And couldn’t Itsuki prepare a medical team and use one heart of the orchestrated suicides I’m thinking then, but that’s just me. That kind of logic isn’t for this anime. Although logic is apparently the strongpoint of the US president Alexander Woody, the most elaborated character of the anime. That is saying much, he was of poor health in the past, thinks a lot, plays MMORPG and also has a wife and a son. Very elaborate indeed.
Magase Ai is the protagonist of the story. Her powers are immense, she can control you totally with her voice. It’s based on something sexual and it works on all sexes. It works through telecom devices but you can’t record it. She can make herself look different to complete her power. But what are her motives exactly? You can only guess. She shows us what evil is? Is she the whore of Babylon, does she want to create Babylon?
Again details apparently, let’s just add some extra meaningless country leaders instead to make our suicide discussion international and by doing that so very important. But this adds difficulties they are clearly not ready for. It just gives you more talking. The script comes to the rescue, Seizaki Zen becomes an FBI-agent and can be at the international meeting.
In the end the president comes to his conclusion from a talk with Seizaki Zen. So why not let Zen come to that conclusion, the international thing is such a waste of time.
Magase Ai uses her powers and the script does the rest, it looks like everyone can easily walk in and out of the meeting place. They could have done so many things to protect the leaders, like a lockdown, only stun guns, no women allowed, no telecom devices, only using a chat-app to do the communication? Of course this smart anime does nothing of that and lets the president end with an earpiece that is easily accessed by Magase, at the right moment, so bye bye president. But not before he can say to us his very smart conclusion, good is continuation of life, bad is end of life.
But this message is only for the viewer as the president is on his way to jump off the building.
Zen kills the president to stop humanity of thinking that suicide is good. So ending life was good in this case easily contradicting the simple conclusion just made a second before by the thinking president. I rest my case.
Then Magase makes Zen kill himself. So what did Magase gain out of this? Ah yes it ends with Magase talking to Zen’s son. I’m guessing his bloodline will not continue. Who cares, the kid is not more interesting than the other suicide victims in this pointless story.
I know making something bad also needs effort, being a critic is way easier. If I multiply all the points it's zero in total.
My advice is to skip this pretentious anime. Nozaki Mado hasn’t reached the level of a good writer/director yet. The only good thing out of this is that I now know not to watch KADO.
