The Ua virus is particularly deadly, causing the victim to violently bleed out of every orifice after 12-24 hours of infection. You can already imagine the means of transmission if the symptoms are *that* horrific. If they did not find Maria Osawa within this timeframe, the streets of Shibuya would be painted in red.
That's all in the past though. Of course, the CIA and Tokyo PD would work together to keep this case away from public light. But to those who did know about these events, they would call it the 428 Shibuya Scramble.
428 Shibuya Scramble is a legendary visual novel and is one of the best that you'll ever read. It leaves an everlasting impression with its writing, the presentation, and its characters.
428 Shibuya Scramble was so good and confident that they featured a special scenario from Type-Moon! This scenario would then get a sequel anime, Canaan!
Canaan on the other hand... isn't good. And I never bothered to compare it to its predecessor. Even though Type-Moon can shit out a well-produced anime, sometimes the shit flies all over the toilet seat. Such is the case with Canaan.
The biggest issue I have with Canaan is that it's simply too campy. It's an anime that's blissfully ignorant, lollygagging along the ghettos of Shanghai while dragging you along for uninteresting ride.
The story revolves around Canaan and Maria Osawa, but you don't need the visual novel pretext. You're not expected to know it either. Cool! What's not cool is literally everything else.
Type-Moon is the only studio to place serious plot points near armpits and butts. They're the only studio to show a no-name idol singing at an Anti-Terrorist Convention that gets taken over by terrorists. All of this feels very loosely written. The lack of cohesion and overload of camp proves that a coherent story isn't a priority. And I didn't mind this, as I have 0 expectations for anything.
For 12 episodes you are thrown through a cat and mouse charade, which is uninteresting because all Type-Moon did was flex their choreography.
Oh, sure. Type-Moon does what they do best, I suppose. In Canaan's case the action still feels lacking because fancy anime military backflips are innately less interesting than an overflow of shiny particle effects. But despite the criticisms, it was still entertaining to watch the eye-candy-laced scenarios unfold.
The characters on the other hand are not interesting. They look strong but end up degrading themselves as all characters search for and display the basic principles of a good anime human. The fact that it isn't grounded in any capacity makes me feel like I'm drowning in this bottomless pool of sentimentality rather than wanting to coddle these cold-blooded apex predators.
In the end, much like the visual novel, the taxi driver is my highlight of the show. Even when he's subjected to anime bullshit, he'll laugh, brush it off, and still give you a ride to the strip club the very next day.
On the other end, I was very disappointed to see the main villain, Alphard, degrade beyond recognition. When subjected to anime bullshit, she quite literally falls off in such a way that nobody could've predicted. She acted crazy cool, but was penultimately weak. Fallen from grace. Truly unbefitting of the mastermind known as Alphard.
And Canaan... ugh. For a show to be THIS centered around her... UGH. 12 episodes to show that stoic apex predators can smile too. There's not much to be said about her since Canaan is a simple girl. The show goes out of its way to reinforce that idea and it wasn't interesting because for 11 episodes she didn't display any hint of any meaningful character development.
In conclusion,
Just another day of cute anime girls smiling, terrorism, and unimportant plot twists in favour of campy feels. There's nothing wrong with any of this, but that toilet seat still needs cleaning. So get to it. 4/10.
Until next time.
