RogerBW's Blog

2014, 11 episodes: AniDB

The perfect society of 2012-2013's Psycho-Pass encounters a new threat.

In this future, it's possible to measure and integrate a person's mental and emotional state, leading to automatic classification of criminal tendencies. Everyone is scanned every day; those whose Crime Coefficient rises too high for therapy are incarcerated, or work as expendable Enforcers under the Detectives of the police force. Our protagonist here is Tsunemori Akane, a detective who discovered the dark secret behind the system in the previous series.

With guns unavailable, the Dominators used by the police (which change mode based on the Crime Coefficient of the person they're pointed at) are clearly great prizes for any potential criminal, and that's what seems to be going on at first. (But why doesn't the central controlling system shut them down?) Then it transpires that someone's able to help lower people's Crime Coefficient, easily taking them to Clear status. That's a good thing, right? Well, not if they're still criminals…

The original series had a good few interesting secondary characters; this one doesn't do as well, and I at least found some of the female detectives difficult to tell apart (they all have similar faces, hair and clothing). There's plenty of action, but I sometimes felt as if it were a substitute for plot and character development. Everyone falls into roles from the old series, this time with Akane as the old hand, and yet again they're trying to track down a criminal the system can't see as one, and yet again there's a revelation of corruption…

This definitely isn't the place to enter this world; watch the original series, which I thought vastly better anyway, and come back to this one if you want more. I did mildly enjoy it, but it won't stick in my memory the way the original did. Cod philosophy doesn't make up for a relative lack of good content.