Reviews

Sep 21, 2022
Spoiler
It started off bad and it got even worse.

I haven't played the game, so let this be a considered as either a source of bias or a source of impartiality, however you see fit. I'm guessing that having played the game could help you enjoy it more, since you get to see characters you liked in the game being animated and interacting in a new scenario.

Pros:
• Good amount of gore and violence

• The voice chat-boxes appearing on the screen were a nice touch

• Some select scenes had a good amount of intensity (usually raging moments)

• Biochips being installed into slots to serve as powers, as opposed to innate powers or having a melting pot of "species" with different abilities, which suits a human cyberpunk universe better

• Nice outro song


Cons:
• Art-style is very Western cartoon-like; it looks similar to something like Justice League Dark: Apokolips

• Animation could be very abrupt and desynced with the background at times, momentarily looking like some amateur youtube animation video

• Color palette is not what I'd expect from a cyberpunk anime, it was missing those key notes of neon pink/purple; it looked flat most of the time

• It follows an episodic format where the main character(s) take on side-quests/gigs and their relationship evolves (barely) with a pseudo-overarching romance/love story; only episodes 8-10 follow a larger mini-plot

• Main character was extremely edgy, everything was an f-word bomb and things like "I'm built diff", written in such an edgy way with a dialogue very Catcher in the Rye-esque, cringy society outcast

• A lot of little story plots are tossed at you without any mystery (i.e. episode 2 where the plot to lure in David is non-chalently and monotonically presented)

• There's this weird thing where characters live shocking things and react inappropriately, often times overly-stoic and lacking any kind of genuine emotion (the worst one being in episode 1 where David's mother's dies and it's apparently 'ok whatever'), yet it fuels him towards the end of the show, adding a weird inconsistency to it as well

• Barely half-way into the anime, the "gigs" become nothing more than an excuse to create gaps between character dialogue, rather than them being the focus point; in some episodes, you'll even see multiple gigs cut into 30 second long snippets only to leave room for, mainly, the romantic story that's taking place and the loss-of-self the main character is going through. Other examples are in episode 4 and episode 7.

• The music is constantly spammed over everything and anything, it feels desynced and unfitting half of the time

• There's too much effort on trying to force the main character into a "sob-story" (episode 7's dialogue with Lucy being a prime example with that "chasing someone else's dream" line)

• The scenery when they're out of combat becomes very repetitive at some point and follows this [30 second combat scene] --> [dropped off by chauffer] --> [dialogue with David], rinse and repeat

• The show could have exploited more of the "hacking" or "digital world", but they kept it very surface level, making the show look like some kind of Lupin the 3rd with a cyberpunk gimmick

• It's mostly a romance story masquerading as something more than it is, and the main character is mostly devoid of any concrete purpose

• The ending was very bad
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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