Last week I finished watching Ergo Proxy, an series of 23 episodes and I just can’t resist to put up a small review about it.
The story begins in a futuristic domed city called Romdo, built to protect its citizens after a global ecological disaster. In this utopia, humans and androids coexist with each other peacefully under a total management system. For some reason, some androids go on a killing spree. Re-l Mayer (see image) is assigned to investigate some of the murders with her android partner Iggy.
Ergo Proxy has it all: dark, sinister surroundings, animation which is far above standard – I dare say most of the time on par with Ghost in the Shell 2 (which I consider the ultimate anime style, a mix of computer generated and good old hand work). The main character has a gothic like appearance and she is just plain hot. During the series we get a few shots of the female lead in her undies, even a short flash of some under-boob but nothing more than that: kiddy-save and not even close to the ecchi category.
So far, its all the ingredients far a kick ass show… But wait, it gets even better. During the series we get some awesome action scenes and all of the eye candy is accompanied by a truly awesome soundtrack. Actually the production team of Manglobe did pretty much everything right to create a truly fantastic series.
So here comes the ‘but’. The animation, sound, characters – all great, but the story just blows… Its horrible: the first half of the series everything slowly becomes clear and everything is peachy – no even better than peachy as I was sitting on the edge of my seat. But after 14 or so episodes you get this uneasy feeling that something is off.
I still can’t pinpoint it but by the time it goes really off the rails you have been watching for some time while having this suspicion that its all wrong – just plain wrong. I still had high hopes right up until the end – I mean, a show which has such outstanding looks can’t just suck, right?
Unfortunately the ending does not safe this sinking ship. I have to applaud the creator of this masterpiece of an ending: it was certainly nowhere near what I would expect. I’m still pondering if I think it makes sense – so far I concluded the beginning and the end must be the product of different writers while a 3rd attempted to link the 2 together.
To be honest, this show is one of my biggest disappointments: I randomly ended up with Ergo Proxy and after 2 episodes I was hooked and expected a treat like GITS was (which one? Pretty much all GITS series/movies) but was seriously let down. I’m giving the show a 5 out of 10 rating for the simple fact that it was cool to watch (most of it anyway), but for the shear lack of a decent story it doesn’t get a single point more…
Rating:
- Animation: 9 / 10
- Sound: 8 / 10
- Characters 7 / 10
- Story: 3 / 10
- Overall: 5 / 10