Anime Analyze: Chaos;HEad (Anime)

So, the next anime that I will take a look at is the series known as Chaos;HEad.  This anime came to be through a series of events.  First a graphic novel was made for the PC (don't ask me why).  Then a video game was made for the PC and ports were later made for the Xbox 360 and PSP and PS3, iOS, etc.  From the plot of the game, they came out with a manga adaptation which later was made into the anime that we see here.  Yeah, really crazy trip for a story to go.  Anyway, the anime adaptation was made by Madhouse and was aired on TV in 2008.  The opening to the series is "Find the Blue" by Kanako Ito, and the ending for the series was "Desire Blue Sky" by the same artist. So, here is my review of the anime series, Chaos;HEad.  

This anime begins with a high school aged boy named Nishijo Takumi.  He is like your average high school guy, playing video games through most of his free time and having all but no social life whatsoever.  The thing about this kid is one thing, he has no interest in "3D" girls.  Yeah this is one of those weird guys that is in love with cartoon characters and pays no attention to real girls.  It is really strange and quite honestly, it has nothing to do with the actual series, so we are just going to pretty much ignore this little tidbit of information, at least when it comes to describing the plot is concerned.  So, continuing on, we look a little bit at this guy and his sister.  He barely goes to school and is really secluded, living away from his family in a crate with a computer in it on top of a roof.  At this time, there have been some strange acts of violence and murder going on around the area.  Being described as "New Generation", the group committing these acts are mysterious and no one knows what they are after.  After learning about this through a mysterious person online known as the "General", he decides that he is going to avoid these things at all costs.  That is, until he witnesses a pink haired girl hanging a dead guy to a wall with cross shaped stakes. That just freaks him out, but not as much as it did when the girl that he saw shows up at his class.  Then he starts seeing girls around town carrying swords casually and no one seems to notice.  This gets stranger when a company starts using machines to create illusions all over town in order to create panic and fear throughout.  Eventually Takumi must get his own sword and fight against this enemy creating illusions in order to protect the city.

Yeah this series goes in all directions and it was even hard for me to follow it at times.  It has something to do with the thoughts in your mind somehow coming into existence through their machine and, trust me this guy has a lot of delusions about stuff. Considering that this guy is your average over-hormonal teenager, he constantly has these delusions with every girl that plays a part in the series (and considering that he is almost the only guy in the series, there are quite a few. ) Usually it has to do with each girl coming on to him wearing less and less clothing as it goes along.  Yeah, weird stuff. Anyway, lets go on with the review.

When it comes to the plot and premise, they really were kinda out there and didn't follow anything set persay.  They kinda jumped around a lot and they almost made you guess what was going on at some points because there were some things that they explained, some things that they tried to explain, and some things that they just didn't explain at all.  The premise itself was halfway decent having to do with finding the difference between illusion and reality and if they had done it in a different way they could have done it better.

Animation in this show was pretty good.  It was made in 2008 so it really is not that old yet and the animation really was not that bad.  The character designs were fairly creative, but the main thing that this show did well was the design of the different swords that the characters have.  They went in some really cool directions and that paid off, it looked really good in the show.

Character Development in this show really had nothing to it with the exception of Takumi.  Through the show he had really no idea as to what was going on, and while we didn't either, he started to get the hang of it pretty well and was able to help when coming against the villain.  Everyone else really had no character development whatsoever.

So, yeah this show was not very good when it came to most things plot related.  But it looked cool! Yeah the story is really weird and the characters are bland as hell, heck i don't even remember half of them, but the animation in this show was pretty sweet and you could tell that they put a lot of work into it.  The premise was a cool idea, but with everything else it didn't really hold up very well.  This show gets a 5 out of 10 from me for all the reasons described.  I don't know who would like this show and who wouldn't like this show really so if you wanna see it, fine, i'm not gonna watch it again, but by all means, check it out and see what you think for yourself.  That's all I got today, hope everyone had a great new year.

Final Rating: 5/10
                          Premise:            6/10
                          Plot:                  4/10
                          Animation:         8/10
                          Character Dev:    2/10
Total Episodes: 12
RVF: Japanese Dub
MRS: www.nwanime.com