This review contains a Discord mod’s favourite kind of spoilers – minor spoilers. If you want to avoid those, or just don’t want to have to read the entire thing, then skip to the last paragraph right at the bottom of the review.
Right out of the gate, one of the show’s strengths is its visuals, it may not have the greatest artstyle you’ve ever seen in your life, or the most fluid animation ever, but what it does have is some stellar storyboarding, fight choreography, character designs – particularly for the Gladiator forms of the Neans – and above all an unimpeachably strong aesthetic and feel. The look of a show is the first and therefore arguably the most important thing that will get an audience’s attention and Metallic Rouge sets itself apart from your typical seasonal anime quite quickly by using its distinct world and visual style to its advantage right from its first episode. But of course, weeb cannot live by visuals alone, and it’s the writing that manages to hold onto the attention that its visuals earned it. This may not be an especially favourable comparison for some people, but there were aspects of this – especially the tone and worldbuilding – that reminded me of Darling in the Franxx. You don’t need me to tell you that that anime is not at all remembered fondly, nor was it much loved as it aired. Without getting too caught up in the weeds of any argument surrounding Franxx, something it did quite successfully was to create a fairly unique sci-fi world while drip-feeding just enough information to create a compelling mystery around how that world came to exist in its current state. Of the various connected mysteries that form the backbone of Metallic Rouge, what I personally found to be the most interesting was the interstellar war we get a very basic outline of before details revealed in the latter episodes start to fill in the gaps in genuinely interesting ways, moving beyond a basic good and bad dichotomy to one where essentially every side had genuine aims that just happened to be in conflict with each other, with unfortunate consequences rising out of that.
Metallic Rouge is an anime that’s a bit hard to talk about, on the one hand you have a well-directed and engaging sci-fi mystery story with a main duo with a better dynamic than just about any pair of characters that weren’t the leads of a romance anime this season, and on the other hand you have a story with some messy politics, unresolved ideas and flat characters if you take one step beyond the main cast. Somewhat ironically, I almost entirely missed this show, only managing to start it and catch up a few days ago, resulting in a viewing experience that was probably orders of magnitude better than watching it week to week would’ve been just because of how many characters and how much plot and lore this show requires you to remember. My mixed feelings on the show as a whole notwithstanding, the one thing you can never reasonably accuse this show of is being boring, so I wanna start this review with some positives before we can circle back to the couple of issues that ultimately weigh it down.
Additionally, in the midst of that more grand mystery, lies the mystery of the main and titular character, Rouge, as each mortal encounter with members of the Immortal Nine brings her – albeit unknowingly, for part of the show – in contact with the truth behind her creation and her hidden past. A mystery the show begins to unravel in parallel to Rouge’s development as a character, going from self-centred, immature and unthinking, to someone who’s capable of genuine friendship and empathy, captured through small gestures like her finally being able to share her chocolate with someone else, and also more overtly through her ability later in the story to comfort and support another character who’s in an early point of the very same arc that Rouge herself went through. Naomi, Rouge’s partner in crime (literally and figuratively) is one of the standout characters from this season as far as I’m concerned. Voiced by Tomoyo Kurosawa, she’s lively and energetic in a way that adds some fun to the mix without necessarily breaking or taking away from the serious tone or subjects that are an integral part of this anime, and as the literal adult in the room she serves as something of a counterweight – in-universe and at a meta level – to Rouge’s inexperience. The result is a dynamic that always feels perfectly balanced, at least for my sensibilities, and it’s not all sunshine and rainbows, there’s an earnestness in their relation to each other that creates feelings neither of them really know how to process but that bind them together regardless. Some of that is, of course brought forward in the episode titled “Family Portrait” which in part asks the question of whether family is something you choose for yourself or something you’re forced to deal with by virtue of your birth, and it’s an episode of uncomfortable contrasts that I’d like to think I will remember even after this show’s done airing.
Now, having glazed and slobbered all over Metallic Rouge‘s metallic rouge thus far, cutting a little further into it does start to reveal aspects of the show that are a bit unfortunate. If this anime’s handling of issues surrounding family, personal identity can be deemed successful because of how sincere it all came across, that same sincerity in the show’s messaging around discrimination and inequality makes its ability to deliver a coherent or agreeable message in that aspect much weaker. The Neans, artificial lifeforms that are an oppressed underclass bound to serve and die for humanity without a single vote of thanks, are the characters collectively given the short end of the stick. I could go on about how any attempt to mirror or depict racism that loses sight of the lack of any logic behind any form of prejudice is going to go over quite poorly, or how Rouge herself falls into the same “defenders of the status quo” problem that’s such a big part of why superhero movies don’t feel all that compelling, or how the arguments presented by various characters on this issue are nonsensical to the point of parody, but the bottom line is that At Best this anime just does not devote the time and does not have any interest in doing much of anything with the ideas it set up. It’s hard to come up with any other interpretation when the only rebuttal to the push for equality is essentially just that equality is,,,,a slippery slope? Of course, any given character expressing a certain viewpoint is not the same as the story at large or the author adopting that same viewpoint, so I wanted to give this anime the full 13 episodes to do literally anything with that idea. On that front, the end of the show may not provide the most satisfaction, seeing as it only really ties up the family drama and (parts) of Rouge’s backstory, but it does at least leave the audience with the fairly inoffensive stance that freedom is an end unto itself. You could point to this as the literal bare minimum it could have done, and you would be absolutely correct, but that doesn’t exactly make it pointless to bring up.
While I’m talking about the ending, it is perhaps more than a little disappointing that we didn’t really get anywhere in terms of the wider conflict that served as the backdrop for this story and the history of its world. What we did get felt like a “to be continued” from a story that had barely gotten rolling, a bit of a recurring theme here. Metallic Rouge is rife with the beginnings of interesting ideas or plot points that don’t end up really leading anywhere or paying off into anything. At a point I expected, hoped even, that the Neans in Wellstown were a portent of things to come, rather than the simple detour they ended up being. But we left Wellstown and any potential coverage or discussion of Rouge’s symbolic value for and possible relationship with wider Nean society in the dust. I can and do appreciate stories that feel bigger than just their main cast, so it’s not inherently a problem for me when stories leave some of their food on the table, so to speak, something to keep my imagination going, but if that’s what the writers were going for I’d say they failed due to the simple fact they seemingly forgot to write any of the Neans outside of the main cast to be actual characters at all. I loved Aerkos from the start, I loved Sylvia, I loved “First” and of course Rouge herself, I think a great job was done of humanising some of these Neans, but it did end up feeling like a handful of player characters in a sea of literal NPC’s because the show didn’t spend any time on establishing the Alters as an actual organisation or movement, or how Neans at large really felt about their actions a lot of the time . At some point I even considered that a second season might be necessary to fully unpack everything in a satisfying way, but is that really always the case? In that sense I can’t help but compare it to Akudama Drive which was another single cour cyberpunk series with a strong aesthetic, but one that managed to pack in much more emotional impact, thematic clarity and narrative stakes than it had any reasonable right to. This, on the other hand, feels like a set of what could’ve been interesting ideas to explore that ended up thrown together barely even half-finished, bailed out by decent (but not always fully realised or developed) characters, worldbuilding and visuals.
A more minor complaint I do need to get out of the way while on the subject of this anime’s visuals, is that at points the way this anime’s episodes are edited feels somewhat off. We have cliffhangers that just feel like someone cut the episode in half before it could build enough momentum to earn a moment like that, rough cuts that were definitely intentional but still sloppy, and some distractingly jolty animation. It’s not a problem consistently enough for it to take away from the show’s overall quality all that much, but if you’re not enjoying what you’re watching to begin with it’s definitely going to be something you notice and get frustrated with a lot. The pitifully flat cliffhangers are, I think, a consequence of how little happens episode to episode, or at least how little is actually Resolved from episode to episode, which is a structure or trait more reminiscent of show that follow the netflix binge-model of release, which again leads me to conclude that I might only be so much more positive on this than most people seem to be because I did not watch it week to week like most people here have, but anyone watching this in the future won’t necessarily have that problem unless you just happen to dislike that episode structure to begin with.
So in the final assessment, Metallic Rouge is a show that really deserves a lot more love for all the things it does right, ranging from its great aesthetic sense to its ability to weave together a mystery plot with compelling character drama in its sci-fi setting, though it does have its shortcomings, including some muddled political messaging and iffy editing and episode structures. Nonetheless, if you’re able to connect with the characters at all, and don’t mind the occasional binge-watch, then Metallic Rouge earns itself a respectable 70 out of 100, which for me is the mark of an anime that’s pretty fun to watch as long as you aren’t thinking about it too hard.
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