This anime is a sequel to the visual novel 428: Shibuya Scramble, primarily drawing from the bonus Canaan scenario that was handled by Type-Moon. It isn’t strictly required to have played 428 before watching this from a plot point of view, though I still would heavily recommend doing so as it’s a pretty great VN and this anime spoils essentially all of it pretty much immediately. As such, this review is assuming that the reader has already played 428. Considering how high of a note 428 ended on I went into this with pretty high hopes, but ultimately I was pretty disappointed.
The overarching story and world building, what with the Ua virus, Snake, various political factions, etc. I found to be really interesting. I also found the cast of characters conceptually quite interesting. However, ultimately I feel all of this was grossly mishandled and the writing overall was pretty awful. The anime starts off pretty great, featuring Minorikawa and Maria, who is now a photographer, going to Shanghai in search of a major story to report on, at which point they encounter Canaan who is on the trail of Alphard and her terrorist organization Snake. Various other interesting characters are also introduced as well as a number of strange elements that seem to be building up to something involving the Ua virus. At this stage, everything is left pretty mysterious, wherein who most characters are or what they’re trying to do is left ambiguous, but that works pretty well and overall it felt like a pretty gripping atmosphere was created that pulled me into wanting to find out what was really going on and what everything meant.
And as the story goes on things very much do get explained, and as they do things just go further and further downhill. The script was building up a really strong sense of mystery and suspense, but the payoffs to that were pretty much universally completely unsatisfying. The core of that lies in the flow of the narrative and on the completely inability to flesh out the cast. The plot moves forward with various major events occurring and the background that led to everything becoming clear. And I think that from a broad view there was a pretty great plot buried in there. Unfortunately, it felt like the plot was continuously out of focus due to a larger emphasis being placed on focusing on characters with most of the major events that occur just kind of being glossed over and things overall moving way too fast and relying way too much on just straight infodumping or things just happening in the background. There’s a lot of elements that it felt like there was a lot more to and that would have been really interesting to explore, but they just kind of get shown for a scene or two and then just disappear without ever really mattering.
That would always be disappointing due to how it feels like a waste of potential, but it wouldn’t be a deal breaker if the focus on characters bore fruit, but the anime failed in that regard too. Character’s in general are incredibly inconsistent as even when their motivations are revealed their actions still don’t make much sense. It felt like the anime was pushing character arcs for a lot of the main characters, but I don’t think a single one of them was done properly. The ending was full of a lot of monologuing and heavy handed metaphors that pretty much explicitly explained what the character arcs were supposed to be, but even with that, in the context of everything else, the character arcs still don’t make sense or really feel all that worthwhile.
Ultimately I have no clue what the anime was trying to convey with any of the cast and though the script was trying to hit some really strong emotional beats, almost none of them landed. In fact, none at all would have landed if I wasn’t already heavily invested in Maria, Canaan, and Alphard due to 428. With Minorikawa it was kind of the opposite, wherein I don’t think he’s a bad character in this anime, but he’s so different from the Minorikawa in 428 that it feels really off to the point it’s kind of hard to get invested in him and I feel it would have been better to just have had a different character in the role. Anyway, as a result of all this, the ending felt immensely unsatisfying and the anime overall felt pretty pointless.
I would like to note that the comedy in this is surprisingly good when it tries, though as the anime progresses it feels like it’s trying less and less, and due to tonal dissonance even when it’s trying the comedy is landing less and less. I would also like to note that I appreciated the random throwbacks to 428 stuff, wherein the stories of each have surprisingly little to do with each other, it seems to try to throw in cameos of stuff whenever it can, such as with Tama making a grand reappearance and a lot of the cast from Maria and Minorikawa’s stories in 428 having at least some presence, even if it’s just cameos.
The art and animation are pretty great, especially during action scenes. The character designs are pretty great too and it makes pretty good use of them. The soundtrack was also pretty good though none of the tracks were particularly memorable. The OP was pretty great in terms of the song and visuals, though the ED I found only decent in terms of both aspects.
