...No, it's not? I know you're going for something that sounds deep or insightful but maybe we can just calm down for a second?
...Oh. Oh no.
(For a laugh while simultaneously unaware of what this show was, I jotted down my general thoughts as I progressed throughout each episode. I'll include some of these quotes here and there.)
#Introduction#
"This show's already giving me a headache. A brutal murder happened and I'm the suspected murderer! Fun! I'm going to become a detective's assistant!" ~Thoughts from episode 1.
This anime was meant to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the mystery author Edogawa Ranpo's death. The anime itself is loosely based on Edogawa's stories. Loosely. I've never read any of his works so I have no way of confirming or denying if this was a faithful representation of them. But given how absolutely absurd everything in this show is... I'm just going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume his stories are better than this. But who knows? Maybe he DID have a minor morgue side character whose segments are completely insane and hilarious that they don't even feel like a part of this show. Maybe he DID have an imprisoned sadist/masochist master thief character. Maybe he DID have a character who wears a paper bag over his head and can magically disguise himself as anyone. I'd be interested in finding out, actually.
Okay, hands down, the morgue character/medical assistant is genuinely the best part of the show. It's not like she commonly actually interacts with or are shown with the main characters though, so it feels like her sequences are pulled straight from a completely different show.
#Characters#
"How are you capable of smiling in this situation you woke up in front of a gory corpse which they think you are responsible for aren't you just a goddamned high school student or something?" ~Thoughts from episode 1.
This is our protagonist, Yoshio Kobayashi. He's a middle schooler who one day wakes up in his classroom in front of his brutally murdered teacher. Basically, his whole thing is that he's a sociopath. His whole role in the show is to say "Fun!" and smile. All we really know about Kobayashi is that prior to the start of the show, he's been finding life boring. We need a little bit more than that to be able to understand why a middle schooler would still be smiling when he's believed to have brutally murdered his home room teacher. He just happily agrees to dress up as a girl to be kidnapped by this serial killer who kidnaps little girls and then crushes up the ones who doesn't want to be a part of his "family" and then turns them into cement walls. Eventually, there's a point in the show where he leaps off of a building to commit suicide because somebody just tells him to. Could argue he was being forced to do this, but he didn't look or sound unhappy about probably jumping to his certain death.
Our real protagonist is this fellow, Kogorou Akechi. He's the actual detective character and unfortunately ends up with the strange Koayashi as his "assistant". He's so good at being a detective that he doesn't have to go to school anymore, but by like episode three, he's been shown doing nothing but crushing up pills, taking those pills, and drinking coffee. He's the sort of character who will put on a record of some really melancholic sounding music and then throw a line like this at you: "No matter how much medicine I take, the pain doesn't go away...". But then in episode three I guess they realized that they couldn't just have Kobayashi and his friend carry the show, so Akechi is the one who confronts the "cement wall murderer". By confronts, I mean he outright starts to fight this tall fat man who abducts and murders little girls. He later has a cast on because he apparently hurt himself punching and kicking the man's fat (???).
He takes pills, drinks coffee, is a genius, and can fight. He's a detective!
There's also Souji Hashiba, Kobayashi's friend. His purpose in the show is to follow Kobayashi around wherever he goes basically saying what we're all thinking. "This is dangerous, not fun, why are you smiling? Getting abducted is a bad thing, and you probably shouldn't almost commit suicide because someone told you so." His whole character is "the voice of reason" to the extent that almost everything he says is annoying/groan worthy. Like yeah of course middle schoolers shouldn't go around trying to solve murders, we don't need an entire character dedicated to showing how messed up Kobayashi is. Eventually, he just starts pleading to Kobayashi over and over again for him to at least resume going to school.
"I'd rather investigate grisly murders than go to school because school is boring."
#Absurdity for the Sake of Absurdity?#
"AND THERE'S PAPER BAG MAN WITH A BOMB STRAPPED TO HIS CHEST FIVE MINUTES IN AND WE'RE ALREADY THERE." ~Thoughts from episode 6.
Love being the equivalent of being brutally killed and then being turned into a chair? Sure.
A fat man kidnapping girls and turning some into cement walls? Yeah.
An episode with the paper bag man having a bomb strapped to his chest, and then the introduction of a cat, a baby, and robbers being added to this already whacky situation? You bet.
An amusement park island with the theme of purposefully creepy horror mannequins? Why not!
Weird nationwide conspiracy with the central message of "murdering evil people/committing suicide will make the world better somehow"? Woah, let's not get into the main plot just yet!
Everything in this show is absolutely absurd but there's certain points where it feels like as if it's "trying" to be taken seriously. Like if someone had told me that all of these things happened in this anime while having this overall main plot that they wanted people to take seriously (?), I wouldn't have believed them. If we had stuck with the chair or the cement wall murderers, I could have maybe seen a possible "for the laughs" argument that could be made.
Going over absolutely all of in excruciating detail would take hours, feel like easy pickings, and would probably the one reason I would maybe recommend giving this a watch (if you have absolutely nothing else better to do).
Chairs are easy targets, let's move on.
#The Main Plot... Section Alternatively Titled "What?"#
"Japanese illuminati is gonna get you THE ONLY WAY TO BETTER SOCIETY IS THROUGH MURDER." ~Thoughts from episode 9.
It's episode four where the main plot really starts "happening", I suppose. There's this fellow who wears a skull mask calling himself Twenty Faces. He's essentially a vigilante who announces his crimes via the internet beforehand and then murders murderers who are let out early or beat the system. But as it turns out, the original Twenty Faces died (via spontaneous combustion, no less), and this is just essentially the next of many in a line of copycats. Or so, that's what they thought.
In reality, this vigilante/murderer of other murderers has a pretty strong following and this only increases further as the show progresses. Akechi (the detective) and co. begin to try and stop the spread of Twenty Faces. Because you know, murdering a murderer is still... murder? Perhaps it's my overwhelming belief in humanity, but I don't think the response that would come from the majority of people is "okay let's go out there and murder the bad guys!".
Going any further is spoiler territory, but there are several flaws/problems I still wish to address. It'll spoil the entire plot though ~~(like anyone cares)~~.
Spoiler, click to viewclick to hide
#Conclusion...?#
"...so that's it? THAT'S THE END?" ~Thoughts from episode 11.
...Yeah, it's bad. Annoying (downright infuriating sometimes) characters, absurdity purposefully pushed to the absolute max, and a strange, illogical, and faulty main plot that doesn't even really amount to anything in the end. I would recommend this only if you're looking for something bad to watch, or if you're the sort of person (like me I guess) who likes dissecting horrible schlock. I give it a score of 2.5 out of 10 or 25 out of 100 chairs.
