Akudama Drive is an anime that seemed to come out of nowhere. Before it aired, all anyone knew about it was that it was made by a bunch of the staff behind the Danganronpa games, which I admit I've never played. Plus, it was initially set to air in July of 2020, but was pushed to October of that year due to dealing with the pandemic. But once it started airing, people were talking about it like crazy. I didn't bother with it at first because it didn't seem like my cup of tea. However, a podcast I follow was praising it, along with the English dub, so out of curiosity, I decided to sit down and watch it, since I was bored and didn't have much I wanted to watch. Well...there are things I like about Akudama Drive, and I can see why people would like it, but...I don't know. It didn't really jive with me.

So the story goes like this: In a dystopian future where Kansai became a vassal state of Kanto after a great war long ago, the power of the police is waning, and criminals known as Akudama run the streets with an iron fist. Four particularly skilled Akudama are sent a mysterious message from an unknown sender, tasked with freeing the death row serial killer Cutthroat from his impending execution. They break into the Kansai Police Headquarters to earn a big payday, with both an ordinary girl and a low level criminal getting roped into their spectacle. But as it turns out, the job is actually part of a bigger scheme arranged by a mysterious black cat, who wants all six of them to work together on a much bigger job: Infiltrating a train known as the Shinkansen, which the people are made to worship as a deity, and steal a vault containing precious cargo. The six must work together to finish the job and earn their large payday, all while avoiding the Kansai Police's Executioners, who are tasked with dealing with the Akudama when the police are unable to.

First off, the animation for this series is pretty stellar. This was animated by Studio Pierrot, which is famous for working on shows like Naruto, though I mainly know them for other stuff like Fancy Lala, the old Tokyo Mew Mew anime, Fushigi Yuugi, and so on. Their series tend to be wildly inconsistent in terms of quality, if the various episodes of Naruto haven't clued you in. I'm gonna make a bold statement and say that Akudama Drive is probably the best-looking show they've ever produced. The anime is very flashy and embraces it whole hog. The backgrounds are futuristic and well designed, the actual animation is pretty consistent, with the action scenes having some really well done choreography, and even the CGI is surprisingly well integrated. None of the CGI felt like it clashed horribly against the 2D environments, and I didn't notice any obvious animation goofs either, so good on Pierrot for making Akudama Drive look great. I don't have as much to say on the soundtrack, as I'm admittedly not a fan of hard rock and heavy synth, but considering the show's setting and tone, it does fit the feel of the show.

The characters are where things get rather murky. Other than Swindler and two other characters whose backgrounds get revealed halfway into the show, none of the Akudama evolve much past their initial archetypes. We've got the femme fatale, the lone wolf, the spineless coward, the crazy serial killer, and so on, and the series never really expands on their backgrounds or why they became such hardened criminals. I heard somewhere that the creators for the show deliberately didn't write backstories for them because whatever they went through in the past doesn't change the fact that they're hardened criminals, which I can understand, but I don't even know if they even said something like that or not. All the characters are pretty much defined by their one personality trait; Brawler likes fighting, Courier is a lone wolf, Hacker likes hacking into stuff, that's pretty much it. Plus, with the series being short, some of them start to behave in ways that seem out of character for them, especially since the anime doesn't show why or how they decided to change. For example, one character is apathetic and unsympathetic towards another character's death, but shortly after that, he becomes more emotional and when certain other characters die, he suddenly mourns them with hardly any explanation or development as to why he suddenly does so when it contradicts his earlier characterization. Honestly, the only character who really changes in a meaningful way throughout the show is Swindler, who actually does have the best arc, even if her first impression makes her comes off as kind of insufferable. Lady, if a guy tells you he doesn't want a coin that he dropped, leave it be! Don't go out of your way to give it back to him and use it as an excuse to not pay for food you tried to buy! It's no wonder you got caught up in the whole Akudama brouhaha, something the show itself even points out!

Akudama Drive's inconsistent writing also extends to its storyline and themes as well. Without spoiling anything, it seems to want to be both an epic sci-fi and a commentary on important ongoing social issues like police brutality and oppression under a corrupt government, but the show has a lot of trouble balancing these two genres. For one, a lot of the reveals later in the series raise a whole boatload of questions that not only don't get elaborated on, but are left hanging without any kind of resolution whatsoever, from the way its world works to the nature of certain characters' circumstances, to pretty much everything involving the true nature of Kanto. Furthermore, the anime really wants you to sympathize with the people who are oppressed by the cruel police regime, but the way it depicts the citizens' actions fail to elicit any sympathy, so for a show that has a lot to say about police brutality, it actually winds up having the so-called evil police shown as being in the right. I think part of this is because Akudama Drive as a show is trying to mash two genres together and not doing a good job at fleshing either of them out. Let me put it this way: A blogger I like mentioned that in order to make a good drama series, you take a few ingredients, juggle them together and let them culminate into a powerful climax, with some mid-climaxes inbetween, and if something has too many of those ingredients, it overcomplicates the dish. I think this describes Akudama Drive to a T, because it really, REALLY tries to be as super edgy, dramatic, and action-packed as possible, but in doing so, its attempts at trying to be more than just a silly, flashy action series with lots of blood and gore fall flat because it took on too many different ideas and doesn't try to adequately flesh them out in ways that allow said ideas to blossom and meld together. I've heard somebody say that Akudama Drive is basically a giant love letter to movie tropes, and all of its episode titles reference various crime films. Maybe Akudama Drive would have been better off if it just picked one or two of the themes/genres it wanted to explore and critique rather than trying to tackle too much at once. That does seem to be a problem with quite a lot of 12-13 episode anime, doesn't it?

So yeah, Akudama Drive is a super edgy cyberpunk anime that tries to tackle important issues but falls flat on its face because of being unable to decide between being a commentary on important issues or a rip-roaring sci-fi heist. But if you're into that kind of stuff, Akudama Drive is definitely the anime for you. There is one thing I do want to say though: The English dub for this anime is absolutely amazing. It's pretty much the main reason I decided to watch this, as Kocha Sound (The studio FUNimation hired to dub it) went all out in utilizing remote recording and getting extremely experimental with casting both newcomers and veterans all across the US, and the end result is absolutely one of the best dubs of the 2020s. Also, hey Crunchyroll! Hire Kocha Sound to dub more of your shows, especially the ones you don't give a shit about, like Uma Musume, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken, Heaven's Design Team, or Do It Yourself!! You are literally sitting on a mountain of dubbable content that could easily sustain training a generation of actors, as well as adaptation and engineering crews, in remote recording pockets while also cultivating the Dallas pool and you can't even be bothered to do that!! Studios like Kocha, Sound Cadence, Nano, Central Command, Okratron, and pretty much every LA dubbing studio ever are also better at promoting the stuff they dub better than you do, back when you didn't swallow FUNimation like a boa constrictor! Stop being stingy about remote recording and treating actors, dubbing studios, and engineering crews decently and get your shit together!