(12 episodes)
What’s it about ?
Teenage vampires. Or something.
Characters
Taito, our average high school male protagonist. Nine years ago he got bitten and enslaved by his childhood sweetheart, but somehow he’s all forgot about that now, aside from random dreams about it. But that changes when a getting ran over by a truck makes it clear he’s immortal (decapitation’s involved) and jumps up his memories. He then sets out to find her back.
Himea, said sweetheart. She’s been imprisoned in limbo for 9 years, and is thus a bit disappointed he’s taken this long to save her. His “awekening” allows her to escape, though. She then magically ages her body up from 6 to 15, because her reunion scene with Taito would have been creepy otherwise. (Not that this isn’t creepy, but…) They barely manage to get together when she’s stabbed by…
Gekkou, presumably our antagonist. The idol student at Taito’s high school, he’s quite the jerk beneath the “perfect” façade. His superpowers include opening portals and the like, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he was the one to trap Himea. He’s followed around by a devoted groupie who mainly helps provide exposition.
There’s also Haruka, Taito’s current not-girlfriend (although she’d obviously like it to be more), who hovers around him to help with exposition delivery and then suddenly disappears from the story once Taito goes around looking for Himea.
Production Values
This looks like a horrible style clash. The basic linework is the kind of bright and shiny stuff, with everyone having wild and technicolor hair, that you’d expect from a much brighter show ; but it seems to have been processed through a brown filter, jerked around to produce unending Dutch angles, and peppered with random post-production embellishments (way-too-elaborate CG runes ! weird CG stylings on the screen borders that look completely out of place !) in a desperate effort to make it look darker and edgier. It’s a complete failure, and just looks hideous.
It doesn’t help that this show is marred by absolutely inane censorship. Whatever you may think about a gratuitous upskirt shot of dozens of Gekkou’s groupies, it’s just stupid to add a big white ray of light in the middle that completely fails to hide most of the panties. And that’s far from an isolated occurrence (either for the censorship or the tons of gratuitous panty shots).
Overall Impression
Oh, dear. This sure went to hell fast.
There’s a wonderful pre-OP sequence where Himea bites Taito (in a dream/flashback) that is deliciously creepy and contains some genuinely good dialogue. But after that it’s a disjointed mess that barely makes any sense or has any logical flow. We also get some abysmal dialogue, such as when Taito stops dead in his tracks to deliver a mightily awkward six-line “As You Know” description of Gekkou to Haruka. There are a couple of good scenes here and there (such as Taito’s body wandering headless for a full minute, or most of Gekkou’s groupie’s banter), but even those are marred by the terrible artstyle.
Damn, there’s a decent nugget of a story somewhere in there. But the execution is far too bad for me to even consider watching another episode.
