This review contains spoilers

Offering a good balance of high-octane gunfights and wholesome slice of life, Lycoris Recoil was consistently entertaining from start to finish. Chisato and Takina are a super fun duo and their interactions are a decent chunk of what makes this show enjoyable. The story is set up well for the most part: the first few episodes present a bunch of standalone cases that tie into the overarching narrative in some way or another, as we learn more about the villains and what they are trying to do. Some cool twists along the way such as Chisato’s heart being revealed to be artificial, her heart getting intentionally damaged halfway in, or all the backstory stuff with Yoshi/Mika/Chisato. Action scenes are all well-directed and fluid, so there’s never a dull moment per se.

Still, it’s dragged down a tad bit by some questionable writing decisions towards the end. Chisato’s idealistic pacifist approach gets explained by her outlook on life as someone who got saved from death when she was a kid, and now lives to save as many people as she can. She hates people who don’t value their own lives, which especially makes sense as someone who barely has much time to live. But they go too far in this direction and she ends up holding this ideal to a stupid degree, letting even terrorists like Majima live, even though he’s responsible for several people dying. The “if you kill you become just like the bad guy” idea is tired and worn out already, and this show refuses to do anything interesting with this theme. Which is a problem I have with a bunch of things in this show: They play it too safe and lack the confidence to make bold decisions, simply doing things the way that would result in the happiest ending.

Take the DA’s public reveal for example. It had reached a stage where it would have been impossible to cover up, with live footage of the girls, guns all over the place, and a random citizen and a lycoris even shooting each other publically. This event, along with all the other shit going on, raised the stakes severely. But they just go “It’s just a prank bro” and how it was all for the sake of a movie advertisement. Majima did mention that the seeds of doubt had already been planted with some online articles questioning this and how it would lead to DA’s downfall, but that was about it really. No real consequences were shown and things just went back to normal.

They make a big deal out of the scene with Yoshi trying to make Chisato shoot him and get and get a new heart. When Chisato refuses, Takina tries to do it for Chisato’s sake but Chisato goes out of her way to stop her even. All because Chisato is dead serious about keeping him alive. This event could have led to two possible outcomes: 1) Chisato kills Yoshi and extends her life, but is forced to face the fact that her idealistic worldview cannot be held absolute. 2) Chisato doesn’t kill Yoshi and ends up dying at the end. Either route would have been dark, but it would be better than whatever the fuck comes next, which is the third outcome: Mika goes to the radio tower and kills Yoshi himself. It turns out that the heart was conveniently never inside him and it was in the bag he was carrying the whole time. So not only Chisato gets to avoid any kind of consequence while getting the best possible outcome, it also makes the “I cannot kill someone else to extend my own life” scene kinda pointless in retrospect since Yoshi gets killed anyway.

Part of the premise behind Chisato and Majima’s final battle is Enkuboku having a time bomb that Chisato will likely have to beat Majima in order to prevent from blowing up, but even that turns out to be a bluff as it was just a fireworks showcase. Also the fact that Chisato and Takina run off to goof around in Hawaii, while Majima is still at large and citizens firing guns is shown to be a possibility, just comes off as kinda irresponsible.

Some of other things of note is the meh world building. We are just given the bare minimum information in order for the story to work. Most of it feels lacking and unexplored otherwise. It’s odd how the DA’s existence is never really questioned by the public despite so many fights happening out in the open where everyone should be able to at least hear gunshots. This one is a semi-nitpick, but Majima trying to expose what is really just a terrorism fighting organization keeping japan safe isn’t that great of a motive to begin with. While I get what he means that the public should be knowledgeable about the people who hold power, it’s not like the DA is all that corrupt to begin with. And about the “false peace” thing, I don’t know if I can agree that people not having to worry about terrorism is even a bad thing. I guess this argument is something that could have been more convincing had the writers dedicated time to explore this ideological conflict better. They don’t do anything unique with the “fate vs free will” theme either.

LycoReco is a good show for the most part, despite its shortcomings. It just sucks that it couldn’t have been greater despite having the potential. There is a new entry in the series coming up later, and if it’s a sequel I hope they improvise on some of these things.