SingleH

Episode one of Akudama Drive is all gas, no brakes. Four badass edgelords who are aimlessly wreaking havoc upon the most over-the-top cyberpunk setting imaginable are offered a ludicrous amount of money to rescue a fifth badass edgelord who is scheduled for execution, and the madness and violence which ensues throughout the course of the first episode is the result of this bounty which they were all happy to compete for, but after having razed the world before them to complete their task, they’re met with a talking cat who has the very man they saved snap collar bombs around their necks and the necksof two other nobodies who just happened to get caught up in the chaos, and the episode then swiftly ends without having explained any of its craziness, of which there was plenty. Episode two, on the other hand, begins with the following exposition, and while dissecting a scene or two usually wouldn’t be enough to review an entire show, things change when every scene is the exact same. The purpose of the painfully meticulous structure of the review you’re about to read is to illustrate the fact Akudama Drive would be a perfectly fine show if you didn’t put any thought into it whatsoever. The talking cat begins by expressing its gratitude towards everyone for showing up, and says he shouldn’t have been surprised since they are all veteran Akudama, a phrase this show uses as a proper noun which literally means “bad person.” After a short discussion which still somehow felt too long, the talking cat reveals he is a robot cat and the mastermind who sent them the original bounty. The few sane individuals present protest the collar bombs around their necks, but the cat refuses to remove them stating this is all part of a larger plan they are now a part of, and while the two nobodies in the group weren’t originally part of it, the fact even they remained standing after the previous episode’s carnage is proof of their skill. More of them protest, simply not wanting to continue taking part in a conspiracy they have no observable interest in, but when a character called “Brawler” attempts to rip his collar bomb off and walk away, the robot cat implores him to wait and pays them all for successfully saving the prisoner, the task he now describes as Phase One. Before he can explain what this means, the character called “Hacker” asks why everyone was paid, when the single individual who actually freed the prisoner should’ve been the only one rewarded. The robot cat responds who best preformed wasn’t his concern, alerting Hacker and all the other Akudama to the fact this Phase One was merely a test, and when asked if they passed, the robot cat affirmed they did so with flying colors. He proceeds to entice them into participating in Phase Two of his plan by boasting the fact no Akudama has ever passed it before. Phase Two consists of attacking the site known as the Shinkansen, the only entrance to the territory in which they reside which is revered as sacred grounds by many who live there. To dismiss their hesitation, the robot cat announces this next job will reward them with an even greater sum of money to make them an offer they can’t refuse, but their conversation is interrupted when the remaining armed guards from the previous episode’s bombastic prison break storm the area. The scene transitions to our cast (inexplicably) relocated to a rooftop somewhere where they impatiently await a “bus,” which in this setting, is apparently a blimp. When one doesn’t come, Brawler jumps off the rooftop and soars through the air straight through the window of one of these so-called buses. Having successfully hijacked the vehicle and murdered its driver, Brawler asks the others how to drive it, only to be unanimously deemed a moron. Hacker does something seemingly advanced with his hands which kites the airship to port, and inside the blimp, he remarks how primitive its systems are and quickly commandeers its controls to fly them to where the cat had specified. In flight, the character called “Delinquent” praises Brawler for his superhuman jump, but Brawler says it’s only natural, since, after all, he is the world’s greatest brawler. Before they can arrive, the character they all saved from being executed, “Cutthroat,” randomly presses a big red button on the control panel which sends the blimp speeding into overdrive. Hacker exclaims that was only for emergencies, and when asked where they’re headed, he shrugs, and they crash into a high-rise hotel at mach speed. Having all miraculously survived, they have a conversation in some hallway where Delinquent praises Brawler yet again for being unfazed by a crash which would’ve killed any normal man, and the police originally chasing them catch up almost immediately and begin firing at them indiscriminately down the hallway. Hacker and the character “Doctor” don’t react at all, and Brawler continues to stand in the middle of the hallway within a spray of bullets which refuses to hit him. Outside, two oddly normal, twenty-first century looking police officers stress over the current state of affairs. The deputy suggests to the detective their men are utterly outclassed and will continue getting slaughtered by the Akudama, and the detective begrudgingly acknowledges the deputy is correct, but when they’re radioed by headquarters and told two “Executioners” are on their way, the detective becomes frustrated saying they didn’t ask for help. Inside the hotel and past the now-dead policemen lying in piles of gore, the cast sits down and continues their exposition dump where its determined all those present have skills necessary for Phase Two despite the fact one of the two nobodies is self-admittedly useless and the other is at the very least known to be useless by the cat, and they do so on a screen inside a random hotel room which somehow contains and can display all the cat’s files and graphics relevant to the proposed heist, but that’s enough narration, because at this point the fact should be clear: nothing about this sequence makes sense. First of all, the briefcase of collar bombs given to Cutthroat had enough to put one on everyone there, but the plan was to only enlist the original four the cat sent the bounty to. If this apparent miscalculation wasn’t enough, the cat is constantly portrayed as being highly intelligent throughout these exchanges, yet at no point does he see the plainly observable fact Delinquent and the character called “Ordinary Person” aren’t in any way the badass edgelords he’s looking for, even going so far as to say their mere presence proved their skill, despite the fact we viewers witnessed the events of episode one ourselves and know they literally stumbled their way into this situation. Speaking of episode one, Brawler is introduced as a loose canon who loves nothing more than brutalizing the police and those who tell him what to do, yet when a talking cat tells him to stop taking his collar bomb off, he complies with no resistance or talk-back whatsoever, completely betraying his character. His subsequent jump into the blimp is dumb in and of itself, but what’s even sillier is the fact he then has the described exchange with the other Akudama still on the rooftop despite being dozens of meters away in an aircraft, a distance no human ear could hear from. And in the blimp, he blows off the praise he received from Delinquent by stating the fact he can preform superhuman jumps is a natural effect of being the world’s strongest brawler, even though hand-to-hand combat has nothing to do with such a feat. Hacker’s motivations and consistencies are questionable as well, since he and Doctor were complaining about the blimp not picking them up, but after Brawler did his stunt and failed to steer the blimp, Hacker just brought it down to pick them up anyway using techno-nonsense, with nothing to suggest he couldn’t have just done so from the start. The first thing he says when he enters the cockpit is its systems are primitive, yet when Cutthroat sends the blimp into overdrive he just stands by doing nothing while they all crash into a building. Putting aside the fact he panicked when Cutthroat hit the button yet was completely calm mere seconds later for a completely unfunny joke, the fact he could take complete control of the blimp from outside the damn thing yet not do the same from inside the cockpit is absolutely preposterous. But specifics themselves are pointless to dissect, since the entire premise itself makes just as little sense. These assholes just crashed a blimp into a concrete building at rocket speeds, and every single one of them, including Ordinary Person, a teenage girl with no connection to the comically badass Akudama edgelord anime gods, survives. Forgetting how laughable it is this fact is accentuated by Delinquent praising Brawler for walking away from the crash without a scratch despite the fact he did the exact same, this is by no means the only instance of this utterly farcical nature of the show’s presentation. I mentioned Brawler standing in a hail of bullets down a straight hallway and still not getting shot, but I didn’t even have space to discuss Doctor literally getting her throat slit and surviving by somehow sewing it up herself before bleeding out, a process which should’ve been nearly instant. Even the characters who look like somewhat normal people are internally broken in the first half-minute we see them. The police detective outside is introduced coming to terms which the fact he and his unit are completely outgunned by the Akudama and can’t subdue them alone, but when he learns the Executioners are on the way, he clicks his tongue and remarks in contempt. I know it may seem like I gave way too much attention and devoted way too much analysis to a sequence which spanned only half an episode, if that, but every scene in this show is intrinsically broken for all the same reasons of forced contrivance and unapologetic contradiction, so such analysis of really any scene would’ve functioned as a perfect encapsulation of the show’s fundamentally broken presentation. Akudama Drive is an anime which began as and ceaselessly proceeded to be a gimmick on every level. The nameless cast of characters defined by the tropes which stand in for their non-existent personalities carry the story of ridiculous visual action which is set apart only by its constant insistence on breaking the laws of physics, and the characterization for our empty cast extends only as far as their paper-thin backstories, many of which make the likes of Kirito Kamui seem sensical. Despite the potential in the art design, the show turned out to be downright ugly in a truly A-1 Pictures fashion, with little attention paid to consistency and polish, but every attention paid to the action sequences and fan service which will ultimately be selling the show to its young audience. While its sheer absurdity can put a smile on your face, and while the fan service is nice in the form of Doctor’s tits, what ends up being far more masturbatory is the show’s hyper-violent gore which often begs anatomical belief. The unexpectedly provocative geopolitical commentary behind the setting and its facilitation is kind of respectable, but it’s also just an inferior imitation of the world in Rolling Girls which explores the same themes with cooler concepts, a well-built society, personable characters, and a jaw-dropping animation production, whereas Akudama Drive does its thing through an unanimated exposition dump in the form of a literal puppet show. When you really sit back and look at all this in conjunction with its Blade Runner cityscape and its Danganronpa character designs, mascots, and plot devices, the more you’ll see just how much of this thing is and always was a pure rip-off. Thank you for reading.

debochca

Akudama Drive is a dystopian anime that, at simple site, is a bunch of edgy characters with a simple story with a lot of blood and chaos on it. And that concept is pretty close to what it is yet, at the same time, it’s a little bit more than that. I wouldn’t call it “a hidden gem” because is not hidden and less is a gem, but certainly an interesting anime to take account. You are told a story in an original way (I mean, what can be better than having puppets as narrators) about the current state of the city in Akudama Drive andhow a war turned it into what they show. Kansai and Kanto are the main cities here. Kanto is the one that won the war, and Kansai is where the story takes place. Kansai responds to Kanto and obeys it, and the difference between both of them is the level of life. For what they say, Kanto is a marvelous city where things are perfect and is clearly superior, while Kansai is the dependant city where regular people coexists with the criminals, better known as Akudamas, who are increasing in number. The dependance of Kansai to Kanto is well managed, showing off how everything is ordered by Kanto and how even the big associations responds to them. The regular people of Kansai live controled by technology, frightened of the violence that surrounds them and resigned to the life they got to take because of the war’s resaults, and they are persistenly brainwashed by the puppets that are presented in big screens all over the city, and that perform like a childlish sketch to make them (and us) understand in a few words why they have the lives they have and why you don’t mess with Kanto, making them see that city as their dreamland, even teaching them to praise the train that comunicates both places as a god itself, as a ticket to their wonderland. That was a nice detail. Although, of course, Kansai is not easy to handle, and since they live between regulars and criminals, and since the city is progressively more troubled because of the delincuency, people hate Akudamas, and when the things get crazy, so do the people and they get plunged into turmoil and starts a rebelion. In consequence, later on, as a vulgar display of power, the Akudama’s Executioners, who are the law in the city, decrete every rebel or disturber is an Akudama, which couldn’t be more accurate to our reality and, possibly, the future itself. So, Akudama Drive, more than a story about edgy criminals, embraces a concept that is wider: the rebelion of the marginates and the underdogs. The story has a clear beginning, development and end. Even though at first the story is a little bit confusing since you don’t completely understand what’s going on, but then it grews in a master plan that only the highest Akudama-rank criminals could make, and it’s still intriguing as no one explains why nor who is commanding that extremely dangerous mission. However, once it gets on the road, you get involved and it gets really interesting as the mission advances. All Akudamas are reunited by a message that offers them a great reward if they get to save Cutthroat, another Akudama-rank criminal, in the place of the execution itself. Because yes, that’s how the law prevents people from becoming a criminal, showing off the executions online, like some sort of deep web site, as a way of saying “that’s what awaits for you if you missbehave”. Anyway, people enjoys it as though they were watching a football game. When they get there, the main character appears there too because she’s chasing a cat in order to protect that damn animal, risking her life just for that. After that, the party begins and when they archieve the goal they’re paid and forced to complete another mission, that consists in retrieving a capsule that is going to be sent to Kanto by the Shinkansen (the beloved train I mentioned before). After a lot of trouble, blood, laughs and fights, they get to the capsule and when they open it they realize that their actual goal was to save two kids inside it. Of course, the main character becomes the big mamma and kinda adopts them. She couldn’t let a cat alone, why would she let two children by their own? However, as these kids are pretty important to Kanto city, the real explotion begins. The story is original, indeed, but it didn’t blow my mind. I just wanna make a pause right here to say that every episode is named after a famous movie, and that’s GREAT. The first one is called Se7en, referencing to the movie about the seven deadly sins, and the Akudama gang is conformed for seven members lmAO. Another good detail. My only BIG problem with Akudama relies on the characters. Something I appreciate in a show, regardless of the story, is the character development. I don’t need an evangelism, but at at least give me SOMETHING I can get attached to: a past, a reason. That’s where it has terrible lacks. Let’s start by the fact that they don’t even have a name. Not one of them. They are Cutthroat, Courier, Swindler, Doctor, and so on. Even the rest of the characters that don’t even form part of the main gang, they all are “executioner”, “Onii-san”. I’m not gonna lie, that really surprised me and it seemed an original concept to me, but as it progresses, you realize that that only marks a line of distance between the viewer and those characters. You don’t have a name, don’t have a background, don’t have the less idea about what they are doing there nor why. When one of them dies, it doesn’t matter if it’s a main or a secondary, you don’t feel moved at all, because you don’t connect with them since they are total strangers. Of course, they’re likeable though, I really had fun with Brawler, specially. He’s a personage that is the stereotype of a brainless strong fighter, but I emphatized with him even though he is shabby and plain. The rest of the group is similar, flat, edgy and generic (And as I always state, “generic” is not a bad perception to me, as long as I can connect with them or actually like them, or as long as they have a background or growing. This is not the case). Cutthroat is the typical sanguinary guy whose only ability is to kill, he doesn’t even know how to speak as a normal person. Doctor is really similar to him, just an egocentric and violent milf, whose only purpose is to accomplish a bunch of fetishes: doctor clothes, lencery, glasses, oppai and milf. Courier is a cold super-edgy guy that only cares about his job. Hacker, even though he is the most useful out of them, is just that, a nerdy hacker that doesn’t care for anything else. He is just a person who needs a huge challenge to make his life worth. And Hoodlum is the one I kinda connected. He’s the weakest of them all and is a weepy and fearful guy. At the beginning he is unbearable since all he does is to scream and hide, and is easily manipulable, but as it advances, I realize that he’s the only one realistic in that group and he even has a little development. Also, I really had fun with his relationship with Brawler, and actually felt them as bros. Is not a great character, but is the one that I can save in this mediocrity of personages. Going on with this, the main character is the one I disliked the most. Swindler is the only one of the group that is not actually a criminal, she’s there just because she got caught up in that mess, and pretends to be an Akudama-rank criminal to survive, choosing the name of Swindler. I dare to say she is the most boring main character of the season. She is the stereotype of the good girl, and all you can say about her is that she is SO GOOD, and that’s really all you can say. She doesn’t have another atribute. You, unlike me, can really love her and empathize with her if you feel so, but one undeniable thing is that she’s a good unmarkable person and nothing else. She is kind to everyone, she’s caring, she meddles in the gang’s plans since she doesn’t want anybody to get killed or hurted, and that’s a pain in the ass to me. As I’m not going to get any character development or depth, I enjoyed Akudama Drive because of the action and the art, and if there’s a gang of bad guys, it’s annoying that this girl intervenes every time the sauce begins just because she doesn’t want people to die. I thought that the fact of her being the only Akudama that is a regular person was going to mean that she would be the only one with a backstory or something like that, or that she would be the bare representation of how hard it is to be a Kansai citizen, but I ended up with my hands empty. Although, she has some growing during the series, even though is really predictable, is, at least, something that actually made me like her better. The only characters that got a background are the sibilings that appear later in the series, and they’re children. Is easy to feel pity for them, but still, none of them has a feature that will get to you; they’re like both robots (pretty close though, lol). And the worst character, beyond my tastes, is the real villain, the traitor of the Akudama group. Since the beginning this character doesn’t have no depth at all, no background, no anything, as the rest of the gang, but when the betrayal is devealed and this person starts to be an antagonist, is an awful one. This personage’s reason to become a traitor and a despicable human being, is that wants to be released of the “Akudama” name to adquire the title of a regular person, in order to kill freely without the consequences, and you know why? Just because this person desires to control life itself, enjoying the assassination because of the exciting feeling of killing people, deciding how long they live and how and when they die, like some sort of god complex. And that’s IT. That’s the only info they give you about the new enemy, and don’t expect another development or redention, because you won’t have any. Is an objectiveless antagonist with no personality as such. My only thought was “k, when are you going to die? Shut up” Then, I didn’t want, but I have to. I have to talk about the Akudama’s Executioner association. My god, what a SHAMEFUL affiliation. This consist in, as its name indicates, a huge group that dedicates to exterminate the Akudamas. But they fail loudly, all the time. They function as the main enemies of the Akudama gang, of course, but they don’t accomplish anything. I had the impression that they were there just to make the main gang look cooler, since all they do is to loose battles against them and to say stupid things like “I will kill every Akudama!!!” when they can’t even harm them. Just one of them is kinda respectable, the first one, but also he ends up ashamed. His kouhai, a beginner, is even worse. Is the typical useless female character who is just a burden for her superior, and she is specially arrogant, constantly defying the gang as if she could fight with one of them without fainting in the process. Disgusting. They alll are pitiful and their boss is EVEN WORSE, a woman who obeys the highest commands and whose only line is “Why did it have to happen when I’m the boss?” or “I will kill every Akudama!!!”. After ranting the characters, I continue. The animation surprised me entirely. I hate Studios Pierrot, so I was rather relunctant to watch this when I saw it was a work from that studio. Nevertheless, is surprised me in a good way. It was decent, fights seemed nice for me to watch, I positively enjoyed them. The art is very striking, with its nuances and bright presentation. Considering this is a Sci-Fi, they are at the correct standars, because is really futuristic and the edgy characters’ design is adequate too. To me, specially coming from the hideous Pierrot, it is memorable. The sound is pretty good too. Music gets you hyped and the seiyuus do a great job, specially with the first Executioner and Cutthroat, who was actually spooky. In conclusion, Akudama Drive is a show that I don’t regret watched, actually, I enjoyed it a lot and it wasn’t boring to me in no moment, even though its big flaws. Even if I disliked the characters, that didn't restrain me from having a good time with it. If you’re looking for a sci-fi anime, audiovisually good, that is full of action and a lot of violence with interesting fights and revolution, this is definitely for you, and please enjoy. If you’re looking for an awesome writting or top-tier in depth-developed characters you can love and care, or personages that can blow your mind, this is not for you.