Island is curious specimen of anime. It's one of those shows where the overall score does little to inform you of what the show is like. Despite the middle-of-the-road score I'm dishing out, very little of Island is middle-of-the-road: most of the time it's either bad or good.

Island is about a guy who wakes up naked on the beach of Urushima Island with vague memories of being a time traveller who's supposed to save and kill some people. For generation after generation, the same three powerful families shared control over the island, and our amnesiac soon gets himself tangled up with the current heirs of those families as he tries to figure out his mission.

Rather trying to make a good first impression, Island audaciously starts off by throwing its bad foot forward. Within the first five minutes or so, the show treats us with a scene of a school girl tripping and falling face first into the naked protagonist's groin. Then it follows up on this hallmark of quality by serving up course after course of bad tropes. Within about 15 minutes, our adult male protagonist cosies up to three school-aged girls who look and act half their age; he nearly makes out with one, comments on the breast size of another, and moves into the mansion of the third.

By this point, I strongly suspected that Island is an adaptation of a visual novel (which I later confirmed,) where the source material allows the player to romance the three girls.

As the episode continues though, Island manages to show it's more than just a pedo-harem bait. The second half started dropping tantalising hints of a dark mystery and a strong emotional core at the centre of the story. A chilling note was found, a mysterious disease revealed, and there was also this music-related scene that radiated such emotional intensity that not even the squeakily saccharine singing could quite smother its effect. Despite the bad early impression, I found myself intrigued.

The downs and ups of the first episode turns out to be a blueprint for most of the rest of the episodes. All these episodes start off badly with some terrible character interactions. Innuendos and brief risque scenes abound, Island likes to show glimpses of pedo fantasies before quickly pulling back with a playful wink. I get the sense that this anime is trying to have its cake and eat it; it panders to those who would enjoy the ickniess while holding back just enough to make a buffet of plausible deniability salad: yes, these girls may look/act/sound young, but they're actually nearly adults; yes these dialogues often contain sexual content, but they're just for the lolz, nothing serious; yes, it may look as if the girl is throwing herself at the guy, but she has an ulterior motive - there's no real substance to it!

And then just as I get a headache from the amount of facepalming moments, the second halves of these episodes would almost inevitably manage to salvage the wreckage into something almost respectable. The series has a knack of turning the atmosphere on a dime, flipping it from cute-girls-doing-cute-things mode into something darker. The character development isn't bad either. While it follows the typical formula of main guy going around fixing the problems of his moe blob harem, these problems are actually convincing enough to lend a certain depth to the moeblobs. There's one girl who's whole self worth and identity is tied up to being the saviour of the island; another girl feels understandably suffocated by life on the island and wants to get out and visit her estranged mother.

In fact, the focus on slice-of-life-esq character development almost puts the mystery elements in the back seat for large portions of the first story arc. At one point I even began wondering whether there really is a mystery worthy of note or whether it's all just smoke and mirrors hiding a platform for the character development. Turns out there is indeed a mystery, and from about the half way point the series finally turns its main attention upon it, leading to the "Never Island" arc.

While episode after episode of the first arc blend moe-pedo-harem trash with intrigue and decent character development into a soup of mediocrity, "Never Island" mixes ham-fisted narratives and interesting plot points - and some moe pedo harem trash thrown in for good measure - into much the same overall result. The story telling seems rather hurried, as though the creators suddenly realised they leisurely spent rather too many episodes meandering through the first arc and now didn't have enough for the second. As a result, most of "Never Island" feels lacklustre; the narrative pumps out (at times ridiculous) plot developments and tragedies as plain beats of "this happened, that happened" with very little emotional impact. In spite of this, the central thread that runs through the series never lost that interesting quality that kept me on the hook wondering what the heck is going on underneath it all.

The concluding arc of Island is only two episode long, but I have to say they were very good, perhaps even great. In fact they are the only episodes in the entire series that I would score positively. The story wrapped up with a jaw dropping bang and left me trying to work out the intricacies long after I finished watching. Only afterwards did I realise that Island had been misdirecting my attention like a magician while leaving some of the clues on the table right in front of me.

I had a little trouble giving Island a rating. The show can't consistently hold together a good narrative, but manages to pull off some powerful moments; the characters have crappy foundations, but shows bright glimpses of humanity to win my sympathies; the central romance has a completely unconvincing build up, but undergoes such epic trials that by the end had attained an almost mythical aura. The last arc very nearly pulled Island into positive territory, but ultimately didn't because of a very distasteful contrivance that was used to make the plot work. For all the pretences that Island had put up for most of its run, it ends up showing its true colours. Still, it's also kinda fitting that the show on balance left me with an almost perfectly poised middle of the road impression. So don't be fooled by the score: with all its downs and ups, Island is a lot of things, but boring it is not.

Personal rating: 0.0 (perfectly mixed)