While It's been a while since I’ve watched this, ChäoS;HEAd is an anime that I passionately dislike enough that I sometimes find myself thinking about it even now. I’m a big fan of the Science Adventure series, the collection of visual novels created by Mages, Nitroplus, and Chiyomaru Studio that consists of the Chaos;Head/Child duo, Steins;Gate and its sequel, Robotics;Notes and its sequel and most recently Anonymous;Code. Like many, I was first exposed to the series through the Steins;Gate anime (which is still my absolute favorite of all time) and later on played through most of the visual novels and to my surprise, my favorite of the series was not Steins;Gate, but its predecessor Chaos;Head Noah. Shortly after finishing my play through of the visual novel, I really wanted to see more and I decided to watch this 2008 anime adaptation based on said visual novel. I was shocked by how unimaginably mediocre it was.

To start, a brief summary. ChäoS;HEAd is a 2008 anime from studio Madhouse that takes place in 2009 Shibuya district in Tokyo that follows a shut-in named Takumi Nichijou. Nichijou spends the majority of his days locked inside a converted shipping container that he lives in, playing MMOs, watching anime and indulging in personal fantasies of his own imagination. In his efforts to distance himself from society, he only goes to school the minimum amount of days required for graduation. Around the time the story starts, a strange series of bizarre deaths in Shibuya have sprung up dubbed the New Gen Killings. One night Nichijou is playing his MMO when he is sent a bizarre depiction of a grizzly murder in a chatroom from an anonymous person. The following day, on his way home from school, Nichijou finds himself discovering the scene of this very murder as it is in progress. While Nichijou is able to escape, Nichijou’s fragile mental state begins to dissolve as he fears the killer coming after him and psychological antics ensue. Atleast, that's the story that's beautifully told in the visual novel. Here, not so much.

The Bad
The biggest problem with ChäoS;HEAd is that it is simply unable to clearly illustrate and explain its own plot elements that creates a cycle of the viewer being more and more confused as deeper concepts are introduced the further into the series it goes. I believe that for ChäoS;HEAd, the anime medium is simply inadequate to properly tell this story compared to how it’s shown in the visual novel. In the visual novel, throughout the story, Nichijou will have moments where he will be overcome with a delusion from his unstable mind. In the visual novel, you’re able to choose the nature of this delusion which will then alter the way Nichijou perceives events around him. I found this an absolutely fascinating story telling method that really boosted the experience. This anime adaptation on the other hand is unable to do this unsurprisingly and goes for a much more linear and neutral viewing experience. Because of this, I feel like a lot of the psychological elements that made the visual novel as good as it is instead make this anime adaptation feel that much more confused and disconnected than it should be. Another strange issue I found with this adaptation is that they don't clearly explain what is delusion and what is reality. The visual novel also does this but more sparingly later into the story. It first plays a visual and audio queue whenever Nichijou is having a delusion only to later have moments where they don't, creating times where it's hard to tell whether what is happening is all in Nichijou’s head or if it is reality. The ChäoS;HEAd anime is unable to do this properly and it makes for many down right confusing moments throughout. An excellent example of this is Seira, a pink-haired anime character Nichijou is obsessed with who he occasionally imagines in his room and conversing with him. The fact that she is not real is very clear in the visual novel. This adaptation makes it very hard for someone unaware of the visual novel to tell if she is real or not as they make very little of an effort to show that she is a delusion. She kinda just shows up from time to time. I watched this on a website with a comment section and nearly every episode had a thread where someone is asking if she is real or not filled with replies saying IDK. It becomes even worse later as the main heroine of the series, Rimi Sakihata, who also happens to have pink hair and looks similar to Seira at a glance, becomes more prevalent. People were thinking that they were the same person even. It was that bad!

The second more prevalent issue I had with ChäoS;HEAd was the production. The animation is simply extremely generic and lazy. Characters will have very odd proportions from time to time and background shots will look extremely bare bones and flat. The fact that something of this quality came from Madhouse is kinda a shock with how good of a track record Madhouse usually had.The soundtrack is very basic but overall it's just fine. Not nearly as good as the visual novel but at least it's not bad. The OP itself is nice, Kanako Itou and the Science Adventure series are always a great match, but the visuals actually blatantly spoil some stuff which I hated. I also found the ED to be extremely bizarre and not really fitting for most of the episodes it played after. The most glaring issue I had with production though is that they had moments where they would alter the source material. In general, I would describe the visual novel as being extremely information dense. There's very little fluff in the story, and most everything that's shown is there for a purpose. People are introduced when they are for a purpose. Things happen when they do for a purpose. This anime adaptation on the other hand handles its time very strangely. I think 12 episodes was not nearly enough time for this entire story. Steins;Gate, which is double this length, spends a large chunk of its first half being much more relaxed and sets the mood as such, only for it to shatter this feeling with its intense second half, all while following the base story to a T. ChäoS;HEAd on the other hand, around the halfway point, begins to lose the original plot by adding a few anime original elements that I felt greatly took away from the story. There's a specific episode and a half stretch I can remember where it brings a part from the very end of the game to this point for very little reason that kills a great deal of the hype from the final fight. This same scene also has a bunch of extremely weird anime original parts that only made me more confused for very little payoff. It is bizarre choices like that that makes the production that much more of an issue. As another small side note, I'd like to mention that the source material gets quite extreme and has a fair amount of gore and crazy moments that this adaptation unsurprisingly leaves out. I totally understand that many people aren't interested in that stuff and I think it's fine that they left that stuff out, I do think that they boost the visual novel that much more.

The Good
With all this being said, I would like to take a moment to praise ChäoS;HEAd’s characters. I think, while the plot of ChäoS;HEAd is way worse than its source material, I feel like this adaptation does a fairly good job of preserving its characters. For the most part, the characters are nearly as enjoyable as they are in the visual novel, especially the heroines of the story. With this, I want to talk about the main character Takumi Nichijou himself. One of the biggest complaints I see with this adaptation is how terrible the main character is, but I simply don't agree. While this applies more to the visual novel, I think it applies to this adaptation too. Nichijou isn't a good person. He isn't supposed to be. He makes a lot of stupid decisions and he treats people terribly. With that being said, I think Nichijou is an extremely interesting main character to experience the story through. I hope most of us cannot relate to him and seeing all the events of this story through his warped view of society offers an extremely interesting scope of storytelling. In the end, while Nichijou still isn't exactly a good person, I do feel like he grows a lot as a person and improves. Again, I feel like this is emphasized a lot more in the visual novel, but this anime adaption does a decent job of showing this too, and I feel like it's an aspect most overlook.

Final Thoughts In conclusion, ChäoS;HEAd is a textbook example of a bad visual novel adaptation. Aside from its characters, it completely fails to tell the story of its source material and will only succeed in confusing you. I tried to keep the finer details vague as I really do love this visual novel and hey, maybe if what I did describe interests you, maybe give the visual novel a try? It really is extremely interesting and I would highly recommend it. The only solace I can find with this adaptation is that, hey, maybe they learned from this when they made Steins;Gate. I think that Steins;Gate succeeds in basically every aspect that ChäoS;HEAd fails at so, who knows, maybe it's possible? It's a shame though that this adaptation has to be the way it is… As much as I wish that I could say that this adaptation was all in my head, I'm not quite as lucky as our main character.