RogerBW's Blog

2016 science fiction, 12 episodes: AniDB. In a world where all power is provided by "coils" that draw from a parallel dimension, Mabuchi Kyouma is a "collector" who gets hold of the illegal ones.

But for the most part that's not what the series is actually about. Kyouma hates coils for reasons he doesn't examine, and runs up against the coil-powered android Mira, whose creator is in the process of dying in an explosive manner; they form a bounty-hunting partnership, but then get dragged into a number of strange occurrences. See, Dimension W isn't just an inexhaustible power source…

I'll admit that the actual nature of Dimension W came as something of a surprise to me. But it's only one of quite a lot of things going on, mostly including – sigh – a whole bunch of fighting designed to show how cool the protagonist is. Kyouma is a badass of the tortured school, and that defines so much of his character that he never really gets beyond his generic nature. When in the later episodes we get into his backstory, it's competently written and animated, but so very much by the numbers that I regretted the waste of competent artists' time on such a hackneyed plot. None of the cast, and it expands significantly in the latter half of the series, seems as though they do anything between deadly fights; they just go back in the box until they're needed for the next scene.

Art is often excellent, and always at least good. Yes, there's some fanservice from Mira, but nothing like as bad as some series. The fighting may be over-long, but is always well-rendered; this is another series like Bubuki Buranki where the director realises that its audience does actually want to be able to work out what's going on from one strike to the next, rather than constantly jerking the viewpoint around.

I quite enjoyed the first half of the series (up to and including the business with the haunted house), but the big fighty climax and Deep Philosophical Conclusion left me cold.