ID: INVADED

The reason I decided to watch ID:Invaded was because of it's soundtrack. It completely hooked me, and so after several hours of listening to the music, I finally started watching the anime. My first impression was this: the animation is stunning, the mystery is intoxicating, and this world is completely new and unfamiliar. I was excited to see where the show would go from there, and how the characters would grow, but it didn't seem to move forward much. I will begin to discuss some major plot points that will spoil the show. Read below at your own risk.

Sure, we had our field specialist Hondomachi go from an innocent character to a cunning and cold murderer, but I would hardly count that as character growth since it seemed like the sudden growth was caused by nothing. It was like, she was caught by the perforator and then she decided to grow up and become the cunning character she is. The only other character with any real growth is Sakaido, or Akihito Narihisago, the only reason I'm giving this show 6/10 and not 3/10 is because of Narihisago. As a detective, it's been implied that he often focused more on his work rather than his family. When his daughter falls victim to the challenger, and his wife commits suicide, Narihisago realises how he took the time with his family for granted. Eaten up by guilt and anger, he finds and kills the challenger... then ends up imprisoned. Interesting, right? Why is a police officer going to jail for killing a murderer? They never explained why, it was almost like they expected us to know why. Okay, fine. Later on however, Narihisago kills the challenger in Kiki Asukai's Id well, and it was classified as self-defence, here are the differences between those two occurences: Narihisago had no proof for the challenger being who he is when he was in Asukai's Id, his daughter was not a victim to the challenger yet, he invited the challenger to a physical fight, he got injured during the fight. Does his inviting the challenger to the fight and getting injured justify how he killed the challenger any more than when he shot him after his daughter's death? No! Moving on from this point, the death of Narihisago's family takes a huge toll on him, and he ends up working for the Kura as a "brilliant detective" and that ruins his mental health even more. When he enters Kiki Asukai's well, we see him go back to his old life, doing all the things he regretted not doing before, while still denying reality. We see him heal, grow, and become a different person from the man who drove serial killers to suicide.
Other than Hondomachi and Narihisago, there are no characters with any real personality, I did not relate to them, I do not care about them, they just seem pitiful and bland. One might ask "but what about Tamotsu Fukuda?" (if they remembered his name, that is), and the answer is this: he is not pitiful or boring, he is just poorly written. A serial killer who drills holes in other people's heads, because he drilled a hole in his own head, because the world feels incomplete, and because he has arithmomania. How does this follow exactly? I do not know. Nobody needs to know, it's just a nice little backstory to make us sympathise with a serial killer, and to give him an advantage to other characters so he can become Hondomachi's knight in shining armor!

Now, what about Kiki Asukai, if she's so important, how can she be so bland? Well it's because Kiki Asukai is not Kiki Asukai. She's a damsel in distress, with so much power she cannot handle. She's Lucy from Elfen Lied, mixed with the archetype of the damsel in distress, fitting for an anime that is so focused on Freud's theory of Id, but it is to be expected that a story that puts so much focus on a character must personalise that character, because archetypes do not have personality. Kiki Asukai is barely a character, even the scene where she leaves the Mizuhanome is so heavily influenced on Elfen Lied's Lucy. Of course, it is more than acceptable to be influenced, this is not plagiarism, but the fact that they did not try to be creative in how Kiki Asukai was walking outside the Mizuhanome and made it so that she was reacting exactly the way Lucy was, means the show has no originality whatsoever when it comes to Kiki Asukai.

To conclude, the music is amazing, the animation is impressive, the idea is great, but the execution was one character away from being an absolute failure.