By Dustin Cabeal

What the fuck is up with shows having a “semi-colon” in the title? Grammatically, that doesn’t make any sense, and as a reviewer, it’s annoying. If I had known what Chaos;Child was about I would never have watched in the first place; I struggled through it so that I could write a review that had some level of competency.

It’s a follow-up to a show I hated. I don’t remember the name of it, but they reuse a lot of animation from it for the first five minutes of this show. To the point that I was extremely confused as to what the fuck was going on. It picks up six years after the recycled footage, and we’re following some kid that’s living some kind of life, and there’s death, and he’s wrapped in the mystery. Listen… I didn’t give to holy fucks about some weird mystery surrounding this town the first time, and when it turned out to be dumb as fuck, I didn’t say, “Yay let’s do more!” to myself.

That’s it. The kid works for a school newspaper, and he’s investigating deaths. He gets a jump on one gruesome scene before the police do and finds a girl at the scene. The girl then turns up at his high school. Oh boy, I bet they team up for some supernatural fun!

The pacing of the story is shit, especially when it’s the recycled/condensed footage from the first series. This fucks up the pacing for the new part of the show in which everything is hurried along to get to a cliffhanger to bring the audience back. That means, no character development and a lot of exposition so that you know what the fuck the characters are all doing. The answer is nothing. No one is doing anything believable, so they’re doing nothing. One’s a hacker extraordinary, the other is getting scoops before the police, and the main dude is just… the guy the story is following. Everyone is just too smart and experienced to be high school students. They’re talking like veterans of their field, and it’s just ridiculous. It’s laughable how bad it is.

The animation is average. It’s not bad; it’s not good. It relies on a lot of rustic colors and shadowing. The character designs, much like the first series, are uninspired and lack imagination. Blonde guy with spiky hair, check, a girl with glasses, check. It’s all check boxes, and nothing is memorable. I couldn’t pick any of them out in a line-up of other anime characters.

I will never watch this show again. I forced myself to finish the first series, and it managed to not only get worse but change the entire tone of the series more than once. It was a clusterfuck of a story, and this is starting off worse than that first series. I guess someone liked it enough to bring it back, but I secretly had hoped never to see this world again. That’s on me though for never reading what a show is about and just giving it a shot. I shot… it’s now dead to me.

Score: 1/5

Chaos;Child E.01