Texhnolyze is a sci-fi dystopia series that’s almost 20 years old now, and one that I actually never really heard of in any capacity until I browsed Anilist for pretty much something exactly like it at least in terms of genre. It definitely gets off to a memorable start if nothing else and presents a world and story that are minimally exposited but significantly more engaging than most anime can manage. It’s not without its downsides though as the implications of some of its ideas and its more heavy handed approach to delivering information as it enters its final phase did negatively affect my overall enjoyment of it. This is as usual going to be a largely spoiler free review aside for the basic premise and setup and some vague references, but because of the kind of show this is it’s gonna be a bit of a hefty one so if you don’t feel like reading much and you want a tl;dr then you can find that right at the bottom of the review after the last line breaker. I should say the story felt pretty neatly split between two broader arcs, but I’ll be talking about the whole thing in general terms instead of breaking it down and assessing the two parts separately because it’s one season anyway and I am obscenely lazy
theme stuff btw
Anime in general has a tendency of spoon feeding the audience with backstory, plot, and character motivations to gain some level of attention and engagement especially in the opening portions of the story, but Texhnolyze can be accused of no such thing. The first episode contains basically no dialogue for at least half its duration and the show cuts from one moment to the next with an impressive fluidity that both compels you to pay active attention to almost every frame and prevents you from getting a full picture of anything going on without at least some thought. That’s what got me hooked when I started watching this and what made almost every episode feel like it took no time at all. There just wasn’t enough time to absorb and consider everything going on in the city of Lux or with the large cast of characters or what any of it meant in terms of thematic context, and that was ultimately both a huge strength that this story had as well as a weakness. If you did stay engaged in any capacity then you probably noticed that Texhnolyze is not by any means a bright and cheery story. The city of Lux, that much of the show is set in, is every bit as bleak and dark as the lives of its inhabitants who find themselves caught up in the violent and exploitative rule of and conflict between three rival gangs which are themselves at the lowest tier of what we see of this dystopian human society. One of the conflicts at the core of the story is what to do when faced with such a seemingly hopeless existence, whether to resign yourself to the cruel machinations of fate or to confront it and embrace yourself and the possibility that all your efforts may be futile. Ultimately, because of how the story is largely framed in relation to that conflict it ends up taking a more optimistic tone than it may seem to have at surface glance, and that’s apparent in the design of the city itself and in the process of texhnolyzation – the cybernetic enhancement for which the show is named.
I can’t get into as much detail as I’d necessarily like to when discussing the significance of the city’s appearance because of spoiler reasons with what it most heavily contrasts, but even so this is a part of how the ideals of the story get presented that’s as important as it is easy to overlook because of how light the show’s touch is when it comes to delivering this kind of information explicitly. The message around confronting your fate and life itself head on, for better or worse, is captured in the stark imagery of the city’s buildings – works of exposed concrete and protruding iron bars that are equal parts menacing and austere. Yet look closer, beneath the long shadow cast by the obelisk at the city’s centre, and you’ll see a place that is very much filled with human life and activity. There are of course some people within that environment who do try to shy away from the nature of what it has turned them into – like the texhnolyzed arm of the woman in the first episode which was clearly a failed attempt to approximate the ordinary appearance and form of an ordinary human arm. But there’s others like the doctor who espouse very early on the idea that our faults and experiences are not to be hidden away but accepted as part of our individual and collective growth.
As a bit of a detour, claiming the show is So Deep because it doesn’t have good guys or bad guys is disingenuous. At the very least there are definitely bad people depicted in this show, mass murderers and rapists who do not at all have their actions glorified because the story chooses to focus not on their actions but on the aftermath of it and the pain and loss they’ve inflicted. You can have a “morally grey” story overall while still having some characters and actions that are framed in broadly positive or negative terms, it doesn’t detract from the tone or quality of this show at all that it does choose to adopt such framing at points. Simply not hiding anything doesn’t mean only the bad or dubious will end up exposed, like Ran’s flowers leading Ichise to safety or the new life that emerges through the raffia.
The antagonists across both halves of this story very much represent perversions of these ideals though, one conflating an embrace of human nature with a state of chaos and the other viewing texhnolyzation as a way to ultimately reject and escape from our humanity. There’s also of course some egoism you could read into not just the actions of the antagonists but several members of the main cast, whether they embraced or rejected the totality of their own being they ultimately acted in a way consistent with what they perceived as their own self-interest, and some characters even urged others to take action in line with that. The thing about self-interest though is it’s impossible to quantify and triangulate exactly what courses of action will yield the most direct benefit to you, so at a base level the drive to simply survive may be the most reasonable path to pursue within that guiding framework. That drive to survive is precisely what Ichise, the protagonist, embodies for much of the story, but this is where we get to what may be some more unpalatable implications of what the story has to say about nature as it pertains to the women characters.
If everyone is simply acting in line with who they are at their core, or if that is at least what they strive towards when choosing their path, then the actions of the women throughout this show just reinforce gender stereotypes and tropes within anime that can be more than a little frustrating. We have a character whose actions stem from some kind of terribly twisted sense of maternal devotion, a couple of characters who don’t really seem to have any kind of existence beyond their relationships with and attachment to the men around them, and that pattern in particular repeating itself with all the women in this story with a decent enough amount of screentime. They are ancillary to and help cap off the arcs of the male characters more than they have any substantial motives or arcs of their own, from Yoko to Onishi’s wife and secretary and even Ran and the doctor, Eriko Kaneda, who comparatively have far greater roles in the story are ultimately sidelined in a similar way. the first woman we see in the very first episode just serves to introduce us to Ichise’s and the world’s brutish nature while not making much of her beyond her sexual desire and place as a victim, which occurs again with a character that Yoshi interacts with later on. I don’t know if this is all part of some greater critique the story is presenting and I’m just too dumb to figure out, whether the story is implicitly or explicitly endorsing these ideas, or if it just rather uncharacteristically has nothing to say at all on this front. In any case though, this is probably a decent point to transition into the next section, so let’s talk about
characters btw
Ichise, who honestly came off as a blank canvas for much of this anime’s run, only really coming into his own as the story progressed and he started to grapple with his place in the world and the changes he’s undergone. Now, the last two manga I completed – Devilman and Parasyte – featured protagonists who underwent roughly similar arcs, so it might be a bit of fatigue on my part but I never fully got behind Ichise’s journey even at his best moments. I already mentioned in the previous section that he does embody almost a primal human desire for survival, but beyond that he didn’t have a whole lot going on and while this is just a matter of personal preference he was more of a reactive protagonist than a proactive one and that’s something I usually have trouble with. Just to explain what I mean by that a little in case you haven’t come across that concept before, I mean he’s reactive in the sense that the plot happens to and around him more than it happens strictly because of him, at least until he finally settles on a choice towards the end. It’s absolutely thematically appropriate but that doesn’t necessarily make it satisfying or interesting to watch by any means especially when lots of characters just get inexplicably drawn to him like Toyama and of course the doctor and even Yoshi. Something like “Angel’s egg” doesn’t have characters so much as it has ideas and concepts cloaked as characters, but I don’t feel that approach works out well with Texhnolyze because it’s 22 episodes as opposed to just something you can watch in one sitting under normal circumstances. Ideally in all that time the audience should have some attachment to or care for your main character at the very least, but that doesn’t happen here at least for me. Onishi on the other hand was a lot easier to get behind generally and that’s without him necessarily having had any major arc or growth. He’s fundamentally the same person with the same ideals from where we meet him at the start of the story to the very end and it says a lot about the quality of the show’s writing that that doesn’t get stale or boring at any point, it’s also probably a testament to the strength of his moral convictions which do really shine through.
In general though the cast felt more than a little bloated and as a consequence I didn’t even really remember the names of a lot of the characters. I mentioned doctor Kaneda earlier, and I genuinely can’t remember if her name is even actually used at any point, I legit had to look her and some other characters up on Anilist before typing this review. With the doctor specifically I found her to be fairly frustrating and that was in part because of how she just threw herself at Ichise and also because of how often she inserted herself into really dangerous situations without any seeming awareness of or contingency for them. For someone so smart, she just came off as incredibly stupid more often than not, and her character arc can be summed up as “fuck around and find out” pretty much, because finding out the hard way is just what she did. Sakimura was another fairly annoying character because he just always seemed to be wherever the plot needed him to be when it came to Yoshi, the train, and the place at the end of the story. I also kinda expected that considering how The Organo (one of the gangs in control of Lux) and The Shapes were shown to act that they would’ve taken a more active interest in killing him when they had the chance, so things on that end were somewhat frustrating as well and inconsistent with the rest of the story. The relationships between some of the characters were also grossly underdeveloped, like the dynamic between Ran and Ichise in particular felt like the show was trying to gaslight me about her importance to him based on the interactions we actually saw them have. Ran is also just taken in a kinda odd direction after Kano is introduced but I suppose some people might appreciate how open ended a lot of that part of the story was in allowing us to interpret the nature and origin of her ability to see into the future.
general stuff and final score btw
The show is directed and edited in a way that makes it stand out significantly among most anime I’ve seen, and even if aesthetically things can be rather drab and dreary it still has a very strong sense of artistic flourish because of how everything ties into the overall tone and ideas it’s going for. Unfortunately though it does miss the mark at some points, especially with the fight scenes and action sequences. The fight between Onishi and a certain character at the end of the story’s first arc honestly felt disorienting, I had to rewind a few times because I thought the video glitched out or something because of the many random cuts and on top of that the actual fight left a lot to be desired. Lots of fight scenes in this show are plagued in a similar way, and really lack a sense of weight or any kind of momentum, but there are some action sequences that are done in a more standard way especially towards the end and I honestly think it’s an improvement. Of course in all fairness the focus of the show isn’t the action at all, so if you buy into it then some janky moments in that department aren’t that much of a problem. Another change that takes place as the story progresses is it goes from being more indirect and subtle to just layering on a lot more exposition and lore dumps, and that actually took away from some of its appeal.
The first half of the first episode had pretty much no dialogue at all and introduced characters, concepts and the world with nothing but basic visual details and sometimes quick cuts from one moment to the next. It was engaging, forced me to pay attention to as much of what I could see as possible and the approach made each episode feel so much shorter than they actually were as my mind scrambled to make sense of the snippets of information I was being presented with and what it all meant in context for the characters and thematically. So in the second half when we have a character just outright talking about his conception of a “sophisticated egoism” and we get some narration and dialogue that exists to make explicit what it had usually already successfully conveyed by other means, the show gets a bit tiring. Nonetheless, between its more minimal moments and its heavier moments of exposition this story still presents an immersive experience and what does feel like a well realised world.
Overall Texhnolyze lands a score of 79 out of 100 because while it is an engaging and unique story in some respects, it only really shines when it comes to the ideas it presents and is a bit lacking in terms of characters. At its best moments it’s unironically that “this says a lot about our society” meme as an anime in the best way possible, but at its worst moments it’s a mess of clumsy action sequences, one-dimensional characters and redundant dialogue. It’s also worth mentioning that if you’re not a fan of sexual content in anime or are uncomfortable with depictions of sexual assault regardless of how it’s framed then you might wanna steer clear of watching this show. They’re not Major elements but scenes like that are not so uncommon right from the very first episode here. Nonetheless the good far outweighs the bad and if you don’t mind generally slower shows then this is definitely a strong recommendation, but if you’re into stuff that’s a bit more energetic then maybe check out my review of the manga series Parasyte
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