If Anti-Climax was an Anime

Night Head Genesis, An Interesting Concept in Search of a Story

by Bolt Vanderhuge

When a show is either very good or very bad, it will at least inspire strong feelings from a viewer, but then there are shows like Night Head Genesis which inspire very little emotion beyond disappointment. Calling this show boring is actually selling it a little short, but not by much, as it had a somewhat interesting premise and just failed to actually do anything with it.

This series follows two brothers with supernatural abilities – one who can sense the past, present, and future through touching people and certain objects, and one who can give people telekinetic bitch slaps from across the room. The first episode sees them sent as children to some kind of a secret research center in the middle of the woods by their parents, only to then skip ahead 15 years to see them escape, and somehow come across a classic Toyota they use for the rest of the series to get around in. If you’re thinking that the series might revisit their time in the research center, it does, but not very much, beyond explaining that the reason they were trapped there was because of an old man who also had supernatural abilities, and that they were able to escape when he died, they really don’t do much with that chapter of their lives, nor do they explain why the center allows them to just drive around on their own, and even gives them money so they can live in hotels, eat wherever they like, and pay assholes absurd amounts of money to change their tire.

The two characters do run into a lot of assholes, incidentally. I was almost starting to wonder if the show was just some nihilistic soapbox but this was explained as their powers somehow drawing negativity toward them. This ended up seemingly transitioning into the brothers, Naoto and Naoya Kirihara, driving around and investigating various supernatural happenings, at times at the research center’s request, which gave me some small hope that this would turn into Supernatural × X-Men or something like that, even if the show was taking its sweet time to get there. A mysterious schoolgirl was introduced and seemed like it might lead into a more interesting plot, along with hints of some evil secret organization called Ark that apparently was brainwashing people to go out and kill others who had supernatural abilities. It even seemed possible that the evil secret organization had disappeared the schoolgirl. After all, she claimed to be able to travel through time and space, made predictions to her friend that kept her and her family from getting killed, and write stuff down in a journal in a strange script no one else could read. It was this promise of something finally happening for all the long, drawn out plodding that actually managed to keep me watching. I sure was wrong.

As boring as this show could be, my main frustration with it was its complete lack of ability to actually do anything with what it set up. You have this research center that the main characters grew up at that not only let them go, but let them keep a car they stole and even paid them as they wandered around Japan, the mystery of what exactly happened to the main characters’ parents, the mystery of Japanese schoolgirl Nostradamus, the secret evil organization that calls itself Ark going around killing anyone who shows signs of having supernatural abilities, using people who have supernatural abilities, visions of an apocalyptic future, and all of it amounts to nothing in the end. Even on an episode to episode basis, the brothers set out to rescue people only to fail the vast majority of the time.

It doesn’t help that one of the brothers makes Shinji Ikari look strong and brave by comparison.

Outside of the pathetic main characters and the meandering plot that went nowhere, the most disappointing thing about this show was that it had everything it needed to actually maybe be good (or at least more interesting), but couldn’t be bothered to for 24 episodes. There’re shows out there that manage to do more than that in a fraction of that episode count.

It’s difficult to say where exactly this show’s failure came from. It was apparently based on an early ‘90s TV drama that focused on the brothers as they are basically continually on the run, and this was meant as something of a prequel to that show. It would be tempting to blame a low budget, because it was pretty obvious at times that there wasn’t much of one, but I’ve watched plenty of poorly animated, low-budget animes that were a lot more interesting than this one to watch, because that actually had a decent story. This does bring me to the most disappointing thing about this show, though – it has a sequel.

Sufficed to say, I would not recommend that you watch this anime. I can’t really say one way or another with either the original TV drama, Night Head, or its more recent sequel, Night Head 2041, but watching this one does not inspire me to want to watch either of them.

Fuck No, Don’t Check It Out:

Night Head Genesis
Based on Night Head created by George Iida
Written by George Iida, Directed by Yoshio Takeuchi
Music by Shigeru Umebayashi
Produced by Bee Media and Actas, Licenced by Media Blasters

Streaming (press time): Not streaming in the US.
Amazon Prime may have it in some countries
Media Blasters has re-released it on Blu-Ray

Nerves of Chrome

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is a chip off the code block. Scroll it, choom!

by Bob Johnson

Don’t wait for me to rant about it. No need to invest 100 hours in the video game first. If you are even vaguely interested in gaming, computers, guns, science fiction, or metamodern romance, it’s time to chip in. That’s Edgerunner lingo for Watch! This! Show!

I can’t believe my eyes! It’s a half-decent game adaptation!!

New crew, same old Night City. Moments before V explodes on the scene in 2077, we take a close look at David Martinez, a kid who gets his pocket change selling exotic VR replays to smarmy corpo kids. The closest thing he has to a friend at school is some choomba who beats him up for being poor. His mom, Gloria, pays his school tuition with black-market implants she scrapes off carcasses as an EMT.

Dave’s life kinda sucks, and it pretty much doesn’t stop sucking, though it does happen to change when a certain high-grade military implant shows up in his life. Pretty soon, he’s bouncing off the walls with lightning speed, attracting the attention of a certain fatally cute edgerunner, who opens David’s eyes to subway scams and the world of merc work. It doesn’t take long for a job or two to get over his head, but as luck would have it, he lives to fight another day.

Lucy’s idea of a meet cute involves a deadly monowire whip.

For a while, anyway. As true as it’s been since the first edition of Cyberpunk in 1988, a runner in Night City doesn’t last long. If you honestly had the choice, would you let the bullets or the daemons take you?

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is in fact a good show, a show made by the best people, that evokes the gaming experience in just the best way. Even though I’ve heard a fair set of arguments that this show is ‘just an ad’ for the game, this is not remotely in the same category as your average dime-novel Halo Reacharound cash-grab. This is real art. It is completely cohesive, whether you choose to see it as a fully fledged anime or a glorified video game cutscene. And I’d strongly argue the former over the latter.

Speaking of art, I should mention how well done the animation is, 2D first with mostly seamless 3D elements, all steeped or borrowed heavily from the game’s aesthetic and art assets, with some wall-breaking Triggerisms tossed in that work amazingly well. 10 years ago, it might have been tempting to do a work like this as some low-grade machinima. They absolutely don’t do that here.

Gotta go fast!

Ultimately, the measure of a show is not how 2D or 3D it is, it’s the whether it was made with real, human emotions, and asks real, human questions. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners has tons of those little zen moments that meditate on the nature of experience. In this glitzy, near-future, artificially-enhanced surreality, what does it even mean to be human?

Fuck Yeah Look It Up!

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners
Based on the Cyberpunk franchise created by Mike Pondsmith
Produced by Trigger and CD Projekt RED, distributed by Netflix
Streaming (press time): Netflix