A naked guy on a beach with amnesia wakes up with a girl laying face down on his dick. This is the first scene of Island, a show airing this summer anime 2018 season. Labeled as a drama sci fi show, Island takes place on an island that is isolated by the rest of the world. Bound by its old traditions, the island has its own social structure, which consists of their three families basically acting as major political figures on the island. Recently, the island has been under some distress and the families are under suspicion. These odd circumstances can only be solved by the daughters of the three families, named Rinne Karen, and Sara, and by a mysterious man that washes up on the beach devoid of all memories. Except the fact that he is named Setsuna.
This show is quite obviously a visual novel. It has three girls, and a protagonist that looks generic as have the watcher imprint themselves on them, and a story that clearly shows all of the girl’s story options. Now me myself haven’t played or seen any gameplay of the game, but with basic visual novel tropes I can guess some things about the anime based on that. So the anime tried to adapt all of the endings and make it flow into a cohesive story. I feel as though this backfired though, because it feels suddenly split from one girl’s storyline to the next one, which made things more confusing for me. And it doesn’t help either that Sara and Karen’s story ended before the 6 or 7 episode mark. I guess in this visual novel there is a very specific girl you were meant to follow, and they tried to make the majority of the show about that. That in and of itself isn’t bad, but it feels like the other two stories were rushed. Especially with Sara’s story, where the revelation and the twist happened literally in the span of 10 minutes. It was resolved as soon as they knew what the problem was. And after both their stories were finished, they were forced to the sidelines almost immediately, now acting as side or even filler characters to react to what they protagonist and Rinne does.
Its mentioned in the synopsis that the island is cut off from the rest of the world, which suggests a more tropical, deserted island feeling. But, this isn’t the case at all, and is pretty industrialized for what it claims to be. It seems to be receiving manufactured goods, so the only way its cut off is that the families won’t let anybody enter or leave. Another issue is with the genre tags used for this show. The first half of the show doesn’t have anything to do with sci fi at all. Even some of the middle episode after that only hint at some ancient technology before we get hit all at once during the last 4 or so episodes. Before that its a slice of life drama with a piece of mystery through and through.
The characters in this show represent your basic girl tropes in anime. Karen is the blond hair tsundere who is the daughter of the family that currently runs things. Sara is a shrine girl loli that works really hard to compensate for her family that has gone off the map in terms of politics. And Rinne is the main girl which has the most backstory and development behind her. The protagonist I already touched on as being your typical anime protagonist. I can’t say the any of them are good characters. There are always leaps in logic and stuff that should have been obvious, but wasn’t. It doesn’t go far beyond in accordance to their personalities. They’re mostly carried by their stories.
Island’s story is confusing, rushed, and boring. The first 6 episodes were very very slow, almost completely ignoring the sci fi tag. And even when they did go into the mystery more, I just ended up not caring for anything they were showing me. Or in this case, telling me. Maybe if this show was more then one cour or season, they would have had the time to flesh out the stories of each character more. I feel like they stories they presented were genuinely interesting, but it was just presented in such a way to the point where it became a snooze fest full of characters I don’t care about.
The art in this show is below average. In terms of both character art as well as background art. On a tropical island, you were expect to get long shots of beautiful beaches or some pretty pictures of some of the scenery you would see. Island has that, but they don’t look good in the slightest. If the show takes place in a setting where it's supposed to be bright sunny and beautiful, I would assume you would spend more of the budget on its art. This show’s animation is also sub par. Its very stiff and it doesn’t do much extra when it comes to its “action” scenes. It's not on the lowest tier of animation I’ve seen, but it's enough to notice that something is wrong here.
Island, for me, felt like it had more to say. But its short run time made it feel like they didn’t get enough stuff into it as they would’ve liked. Anyway, the end result is a bad show all around. I recommend this to someone who wouldn’t mind waiting for a while to watch a only decent sci fi mystery. Maybe someone else can appreciate Island more than I could. I give this show a 3 out of 10. This has been PixEFit’s spoiler free, but not really anime review on Island.
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