(13 episodes)
What’s it about ?
An underground fighting ring featuring mindless beasts went horribly wrong the day the 13 of them became sentient, killed everyone in the audience and escaped. Oops. Ten years later, they’re still at large, with at least one of them operating as a serial killer. Double-oops. Carnage and ultraviolence ensues.
Characters
Mr Kanzaki used to be a scientist or something at the fighting ring ; he managed to escape with a baby who’s obviously related to the monsters. Ten years later, he’s now a hobo trying to raise the kid as best as he can. Yeah, he was always doomed not to survive the first episode.
Jin, the kid, has a bit of trouble understanding some concepts such as other people not healing almost instantly ; but then it’s obvious “Gramps” dodged a lot of issues. He’s inhumanely strong and fast, and after a moment of intense stress he can transform into ZET, something which looks more like a sentai superhero than the other monsters.
Jin has a couple of friends from a rich family (their daddy disapproves, obviously). He also befriends a “nightclub dancer” after saving her from a mugging, and she’s impressed enough to become his mother figure after “Gramps” bites the dust.
Besides the serial killer (whose body count this episode reaches at least a dozen before Jin puts him down), we see a couple other of the monsters. There’s the mandatory slick dude who works for a conspiracy, but more intriguingly there’s another who seems to work as police (although he doesn’t seem too good at it).
Oh, and there’s a grizzled police detective running around trying to understand what the heck is going on. Good luck, chap.
It seems there’s gonna be a timeskip, with next episode featuring Jin as a teenager.
Production Values
Oh, look, it’s shaky-cam animation, where the editing makes it almost impossible to follow the action sequences around !
Also, the soundtrack’s a bit crap, and that’s even without going into the ludicrously upbeat OP played at the end.
Overall Impression
Urgh. There’s such a thing at taking grim’n’gritty too far, especially when there’s no nuance whatsoever in its depiction of society. (Hobos & night club workers ? Good. Businessmen, and the rich in general ? Bad.) Every single character here is completely one-dimensional, which makes it hard to care about any of them. The plot has no originality whatsoever to it, either.
It’s crap. Not a kind of crap I’ve seen much of recently in anime, but still crap.
