Something I always do before watching an anime, specially an original one not based on a source material, is seeing the previous works from its director, as that’s usually a good sign of what you’re getting into. Motonobu Hori being the name at the helm of this anime was an instant red flag, as he had previously helmed 2 shows (Carole and Tuesday, Super Crooks) that are very bad, and Metallic Rouge ends up unsurprisingly suffering from many problems.

Its attempts at a story are slow paced, but not because it can actually set anything of substance, but because it feels like it has no idea what it truly wants to be, between the CGDCT-type protagonists that feel straight from a Lycoris Recoil rip-off, cyberpunk world that’s the millionth take on the long used “robots can dream” plot, mystery story with no actual driving question, this show feels like a mismatch of ideas that never truly gel together. Aside from its aimless plot, the characters have no chemistry, the attempts at making them feel like friends being incredibly forced, while the animation is bog standard from the Bones staff, and the scenes they seem to actually care about (the fight parts) just feel so bland, I literally stare at them with a blank expression as none of them make me feel anything.

Even worse, the series suffers from a major case of what’s known as narrative gaslighting. It tells you things, but these things don’t match up with what’s actually happening, and it refuses to accept it’s wrong and instead convince you it’s right. Neans are treated as these poor little things that are always suffering… when we see that the reason they’re like this is because they’re very clearly a danger to people, they seek to attack humans and only don’t because they were wise enough to put restrainers on them, the ones we see entering fights are clearly the type who’d kill a person the second they got a chance, with Rouge’s clearly violent behavior from not having these restrains being the best example. Neans are supposed to be seen as victims, when they very much either a) shouldn’t have issue with being unable to attack people given they literally exist for labor and thus should carry no desire to fight or b) are a restrain away from becoming dangerous criminals, so it feels very rational for them to not be allowed to become murderers.

At the end of the day, the biggest sin of this series is that it’s just so empty. I scrambled to even write what to say here as this show is just so lacking in terms of substance, it’s hard to critique something in a constructive manner when I can basically sum up every single issue with this show by saying “every part of it sucks”, as it’s really just a bunch of bad writing that doesn’t have anything to make it stand out. Metallic Rouge is simply a fundamentally flawed series to its very core, with barely any aspect of it that doesn’t suck, so a project so blatantly doomed to fail as this one is painful to see, because it was a forgone failure from its inception.

Thank you for reading