I've been baited by the damn semicolon. After coming off Occultic;Nine last season, I thought I could at the very least find some sort of intrigue to enjoy here. I knew that the prequel to this series, Chaos;Head, was near universally panned, but Silver Link had me interested when they offered up a special "recap" of Chaos;Head re-animated and clarified as episode one. After that (and a trip to the Chaos;Head wiki), I felt pretty confident that I'd be able to understand what was going to happen in Chaos;Child. I couldn't have been more wrong, and I'm 99.99% sure that it isn't even my fault.

Now, although Child is definitely a sequel to Head, the new plot of Child more so builds off of the results of Head instead of continuing some sort of overarching narrative. The show sets itself up as some sort of supernatural murder mystery concerning psychic powers. Not a bad premise but certainly not something terribly original. Of course it's set in high school, and we've got probably the most stereotypical cast of visual novel characters of all time. I've already made it a habit of rattling off tropes so I'll spare you this time, but just know that there is nothing original or interesting about our characters here... at least not at first. As the incredibly convoluted and confusing story plods forward, a two or three of them start to become slightly more interesting with their own sorry excuses for motivations other than "let's solve the mystery because MC likes mysteries".

As the plot all comes vomiting out after about the first five or six episodes of doing next to nothing to advance it, it becomes terribly apparent just how poorly the adaptation was done. Chaos;Child is a pretty well liked and in-depth visual novel with ~50+ hours of gameplay, so a branching narrative is obviously one of its strong points. In adapting that, the directors chose to basically "set up" everything first, which lead to the 5 or 6 episodes of no advancement and the subsequent vomit. I don't understand why anime directors think they can get away with these "condensed" VN adaptations. We need look no further than the original Fate/Stay Night by DEEN to realize that this approach is never going to work well.

In Chaos;Child's case, this just makes the already pretty weak climax and "twist" we are presented with in the second half feel even more out-of-left-field and not genuine than they already would have if the director would have just stuck to adapting one VN route. This isn't even acknowledging the other ridiculous plot points, such as Nono being shanked in an alley and left for dead, surviving as if nothing had happened, and instead of being hospitalized just being laid down in her home, TREATED BY HER FRIENDS AS IF SHE HAD A COLD. The utter insanity of how some of these actions play out (and are flat-out glossed over by the characters) is frankly unforgivable.

Go read a synopsis, and if it sounds even remotely interesting to you, just go out and play the VN. There's honestly nothing to enjoy here in the adaptation outside of possibly the first episode and some incredibly generic art, character designs, and music.