Boogiepop Phantom
(12 episode series)
While Baccano! managed to pull off the ADD editing somehow, this series made all the skipping around a bit annoying. It also tended to skip around in time and location, though each episode was basically its own self-contained story. Each tended to intersect with more than one other episode, however, so it could get a bit confusing to follow. There were also so many different characters that it became hard to remember their names, at least, to even really see how much each storyline might intersect with another. It also might have helped if I'd understood what was going on or what the show was even really about.
The title character basically goes around and disappears various characters that all have special powers of some kind, usually after chastising them for the use of those powers. She alternatively refers to herself as Death, and as "saving" the people she makes disappear, so it's hard to tell if she's a villain or not. I normally like ambiguity, but this was just confusing. I guess making them disappear into thin air (or cocooning them as is revealed close to the end) is somewhat better than the obviously evil "composite" humans who literally ate people who were supposed to represent evolution within the human species. The big evil organization they belonged to apparently controlled everything while actually preferring to just observe, except when it came to preventing change, as in evolution in humans. That's pretty much all I got out of the series.
According to my research (as in, I read the Wiki article), this anime was apparently made with the assumption that the viewer had read the source material, and that this wasn't an adaptation so much as an addition to it. That could be why the anime seemed to hit the ground running and never really slowed down to me, but even if that wasn't the case, I'd say that this series was severely lacking in story structure and development.
I guess if you like having your mind screwed with a bit, this might be worth a watch, but I'm guessing most would simply find this series confusing and hard to follow. 3/10.
(12 episode series)
While Baccano! managed to pull off the ADD editing somehow, this series made all the skipping around a bit annoying. It also tended to skip around in time and location, though each episode was basically its own self-contained story. Each tended to intersect with more than one other episode, however, so it could get a bit confusing to follow. There were also so many different characters that it became hard to remember their names, at least, to even really see how much each storyline might intersect with another. It also might have helped if I'd understood what was going on or what the show was even really about.
The title character basically goes around and disappears various characters that all have special powers of some kind, usually after chastising them for the use of those powers. She alternatively refers to herself as Death, and as "saving" the people she makes disappear, so it's hard to tell if she's a villain or not. I normally like ambiguity, but this was just confusing. I guess making them disappear into thin air (or cocooning them as is revealed close to the end) is somewhat better than the obviously evil "composite" humans who literally ate people who were supposed to represent evolution within the human species. The big evil organization they belonged to apparently controlled everything while actually preferring to just observe, except when it came to preventing change, as in evolution in humans. That's pretty much all I got out of the series.
According to my research (as in, I read the Wiki article), this anime was apparently made with the assumption that the viewer had read the source material, and that this wasn't an adaptation so much as an addition to it. That could be why the anime seemed to hit the ground running and never really slowed down to me, but even if that wasn't the case, I'd say that this series was severely lacking in story structure and development.
I guess if you like having your mind screwed with a bit, this might be worth a watch, but I'm guessing most would simply find this series confusing and hard to follow. 3/10.