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@theplokoonyreview
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Before I actually started this show, I thought it would be my favourite anime of the year.
It‘a animated by Studio WIT, had high rating’s on every platform with incredibly passionate reviews, and I personally tend to really like sci-fi. This is my type of show, I thought that until I actually began to watch it.
There are a few good things, like the smooth animation and decent soundtrack. But past technical aspects, I can’t think of anything positive to say. The characters were lifeless with arcs that just went in circles, the time travel mechanic is lazily handled and the lack of well constructed tension makes it boring.
Animation and Soundtrack:
Most of Vivy’s technical aspects are very strong. Even just the typical animation found in this show gives more than enough detail to paint a telling picture while keeping the character motions smoothly detailed. It was impressive how the animation always did what a scene needed from it effortlessly, whether it was trying to communicate an expression or situation through the visuals, it
succeeded in making the entire scene fascinating to watch. The fight scenes are also some of the best this entire year, taking its fluidity within movements to an entirely different level. The show doesn’t skip details in depicting most of these scenes, these entire swiftly paced scenes can be clearly viewed as characters jump around each other with a striking amount of detail and presence. The end
result is incredibly satisfying to watch, and are some of the only times I truly felt immersed in what I was watching.
Music is a huge part of this show, with the main character being an singing A.I. A lot of the songs were overly cutesy and suffocatingly sentimental, so most of the emotional effect was lost on me and instead replaced with cringe from how shameless and simple it was. Fortunately, I don’t speak Japanese, and all the songs are in Japanese. I chose not to read the lyrics and instead admire the beautiful sound of the voice and instrumental, plus the eye catching animation which flattered the performance. These songs are sweetly composed, so I could still appreciate this despite having trouble taking the lyrics seriously.
Negative: Characters/a bunch of other stuff
I believe a large reason why this show got boring for me was the lack of any engaging characterization. Vivy is the AI main character, and she’s awfully handled. Her entire mission is to make humans happy, but throughout the show she barely spends anytime with humans. There are a few instances where she
does have a human connection (such as the first episode) and during that time the humanity of these characters reflect in her own journey and goal.
Unfortunately, these moments are lost within the annoyingly simple and charmless dynamic between her and Matsumoto, her other AI counterpart. As for Vivy herself, she’s emotionless, her physical movements are lifeless, and she’s single minded. She’s a robot so it makes sense, but at the same time, this is not nearly enough to flesh out a main character. The show heavily conditioned itself
by having its main character be so expressionless, and instead of using this unique character to explore new ground, it trips itself up in trying to respect her lack of humanity. This ends in the shows avoiding to characterize her, which is a horrible solution. There’s so many crammed in exposition dumps from Matsumoto, senseless plot devices disguised as characters, and grand but
ultimately shallow journeys which get spread thinly over the course of a 100 year timeline. This show is doing everything it can to avoid diving deeper into Vivy’s character. This normally wouldn’t be *as* big of a problem, but the show really relied on the characters landing. The world is generic for a futuristic setting, it’s the same as the real world but with robots and some neon green lines that show up in clothes. Meanwhile, the show basically writes itself with how Matsumoto can pop up at anytime and then set up a 2-3 episode long mission by explaining the exact scenario what they have to do. Nothing else is happening of interest, and unfortunately the characters are the exact same. It simultaneously gives itself very difficult challenges with unorthodox characters, and on the other hand a very easy job with recycling a sci-fi world and having an easy to follow plot structure. In the end, everything falls flat when the possibilities that come with Vivy never get explored, and she ends up being just as mediocre as the rest of the show.
This is an adventure anime that can’t provide interesting side characters, in fact most of those characters get a backstory that takes time and the focus away from Vivy, compromising the show rather than helping it. Some of the journeys for the side characters acted like they had something really profound to say, but the show is so fast paced that it doesn’t do a very good job at siphoning that out. It’s amazing what having a rushed script can do, and in this case it just half delivers on every idea or character it explores.
Also, Vivy and Matsumoto have one of the worst dynamics I’ve ever seen. Each one of their conversations sounds the exact same, it’s Matsumoto making quirky comments and acting as the explanation for everything to Vivy, while Vivy acts the complete opposite and just expressionlessly agrees or objects. This is like contrasting Jar Jar Binks (I saw someone else compare him to Binks and I couldn’t agree more) to a stone. They’re both still charmless and watching their conversations go on and on is just disengaging. It’s also hard to sympathize with or even understand Matsumoto without factoring in the dynamic, he’s a heartless ai who only gets a facade of annoying quips for personality. The duo is also insanely overpowered and seeing them have a brainless solution for every outlandish problem becomes boring, but I’ve already said a lot here so I’ll expand on that in its dedicated section.
Negative: Time Travel
I’m just off the heels of complaining about Tokyo Revenger’s use of time travel, but I think Vivy’s may be even worse. Time Travel is heavily relief on as a plot device, it makes every major plot point feasible and gives underlying significance to every mission. I believe when a show uses time travel to justify its existence, the better the time travel is, the better the entire experience will be. If the show doesn’t have a good base to start off from and even worse, never expands more on this base, it becomes destructive to the final product. Vivy is horribly guilty of this, it uses the “change very specific moments in the past to save the future” depiction and never adds any more intrigue to it. This simplistic and consistent use of an unpredictable and wildly complex mechanic is an immediate indicator of how much thought a creator put into the whole show. It’s also presented pretty awfully, Matsumoto knows everything about time travel and just recycles information to Vivy, swiftly taking any fascination out of the presentation. Travel travel is also weirdly convenient, by exclusively benefiting the characters, any potential intrigue is stripped from the experience.
Negative: Time Travel Cont
But, at the end this all changes, and this plot twist makes everything even worse than I could have imagined. (SPOILER START) At the end of the show, Vivy takes on a fully actualized computer. Vivy has changed all the singularity points so the future should’ve changed, but it hasn’t. The computer actually went back in the past and undid every action that Vivy made so all her actions over the past 100 years were for nothing. I’m not sure what the point of making a show with time travel is if there aren’t going to be consequences or changes to the future. The show relied on time travel to carry itself through the story, but then negates everything that time travel set up by undoing it with one set of dialogue. There
was no foreshadowing for this either, it was thrown into a scene that was already stuffed with a lot of big revelations so this reveal wasn’t even given time to stick out from the rest. It felt like the last 12 episodes just lost their already stretched logic, the reason for this shows existence is treated so horribly that it gets abandoned without a care.
Negative: No Tension/Suspense
Vivy and Matsumoto are such a powerful team that the show never find a interesting way for them to get out of a situation. Matsumoto has the ability to manipulate anything in their environment, he can hack through anything “unhackable”, can easily access any information he needs, and he’s unkillable since he can transfer his conscious anywhere. Whenever the show introduces a problem, Matsumoto is immediately the answer to it. The character never needs to work around an inherent disadvantage to overcome a difficult problem, he just has to “hack” something and any of the interesting or daunting problems they face are given a solution. It shows a creative bankruptcy, to see Matsumoto breeze through every conflict in the show makes this an incredibly disengaging experience.
But that’s only half the team, Vivy also provides repetitiously brain dead solutions. She can just brute strength her way through a problem, she’s on par with or stronger than anyone else in the show and this strength isn’t deserved either. It’s not through learning or hard work that she can beat anyone in the
show, she gets a combat style installed in her system and suddenly gains other worldly physical abilities. (MINOR SPOILERS) I appreciated how in the first episode she rejected the combat system because she was worried it would interfere with her singing, it forced an unorthodox solution to the problem at hand. The solution was still Matsumoto doing some more hacking, but his way of
manipulating the vision of the villains was more interesting than otherwise. Although, all this goes to waste when in the next episode she accepts the combat system and her singing doesn’t get effected either. (SPOILERS END) The fight scenes are visually impressive, but seeing Vivy mindlessly tackle problems head on and succeed just felt like a waste of an adventure. She almost always wins, so there’s no suspense as to whether she’ll pull through, I began to root for the villains in hopes that something different would happen.
Overall, while its technical elements have thought and effort put into them, I really couldn’t stand this show. It’s boring, the character range from boringly written to annoyingly boringly written, the time travel is conveniently simple, while tension or suspense is impossible to achieve when the challenges that face characters can be solved with a simple hack or a punch.
I found myself just waiting for some episodes to end, the show suffers from being so painfully simplistic and straightforward with its elements that any intrigue is destroyed by how mediocre it all is. It isn’t memorably bad, and it definitely isn’t memorably good.
Entertainment rating: 2.5/10
Critical rating: 4.5/10
Final rating: 4/10
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