Anime: Id:Invaded

TL; DR: PROS: -Interesting concept, pretty great and very fleshed out protagonist, decent main girl, reasonable and understandable logic, good directing and visual representation of the subject matter, anti escapism message.

CONS: -Underwhelming villain and side characters, erratic pacing, rushed and convenient outcomes.

VERDICT: Positives and negatives are equaled.

Despite being fairly ignored, ID: Invaded has a rather good rating wherever you find it and is not really surprising since it feels uncommon for its time, nowadays isekai with harem vibes is the trend and here we are with a murder mystery show about chasing criminals in their subconsciousness in virtual worlds.

On a personal level it is also a show that you get to enjoy and understand more when you rewatch it and it will always be engraved in my head as a reminder that you should not write something about a show you don’t remember all to well or else you end making shit which you can’t back up too well once you are confronted about it.

On paper it combines elements from three highly regarded anime such as Paprika and Psycho-Pass with bits of Ghost in the Shell. What it misses from those anime are the mind fuckery visuals and directing to convey an anti escapism message from Paprika, the dynamics between the main duo as well as the memorable antagonist and the sociopolitical themes from Psycho-Pass, and the excused infodumps for detailed explanations of how everything works from GitS, thus coming off as an imitation of the three. And I’m not fan of two of them, which means I didn’t like this show either.

Actually there’s an anti escapism message presented by the protagonist running away from his tragic past in the well and some of the criminals hiding their real reasons behind made up ones, but it all gets lost under the mystery and the cases up until the end. And although the system used in the series as well as the security it uses are explained, they still feel like incomplete explanations with boring visual presentations.

Despite having a similar main duo of rookie police/detective and former criminal now used as an agent as Psycho-Pass, the protagonists here don’t interact with each other well into midway in the show and thus don’t influence each up until the end. Well the girl wants to enter the virtual worlds just like the man but is not because of him, she’s curious about it from the very beginning.

Up until that point you have them both solving seemingly episodic cases on their own, and I’ll give credit to the show for showing the minds of the criminals as destroyed places such as a whole city burning or…whatever that first world on the first two episodes was, basically showing how messed up they are, even if they are nothing compared to the dream sequences of Paprika.

Another thing I’ll give credit to the show for, is becomming full psychological, promoting an anti escapism message as well as a message about not giving up on life despite how hard it might be and even blending reality and subconsciousness near the end, but not exactly at the end thus making it feel unimportant as a certain mecha show did. Also, unlike Paprika, the finale here doesn’t feel like something that just came out of a fighting shounen.

Another mini plus is having the balls to show violence without censoring and without being too edgy or gruesome, it keeps the dark and serious tone while exploring the subject and without becoming sensationalism or a spectacle.

In my older review I wrote this:

“Now, despite having an explanation for how that works, what I don’t understand is how do you have a device to enter the minds of criminals who you don’t know where they are in the real life, nor do I understand why would anyone connect people to a messed up mind without having any form of security in order to protect them that isn’t just disconnecting them, which in turn surprises me that it doesn’t have any secondary effect on said people.”

There’s an explanation but the issue lies in its fundamentals, the mechanism seems possible but what is lacking is the definition of what are these crime particles anyway and how are they actually detected.

An element that will feel weird at first, like in every science fiction show that has a society that seems to be just like ours but with advanced technology like a mind being seen as a sort of hollogram and a machine that can detect particles, is that is hard to accept such things in our present time and day and how convenient they are. I can still kinda overlook all of that, since we need a premise to make the show start.

As for the security, there’s the memory eraser in the virtual world, which otherwise offers nothing in the real world, and thus the real people. Again, GitS was much more detailed in this regard.

I also have issues on the fact that the mechanism treats people with suicidal thoughts or sudden killing intentions and serial killers equally, I guess other people with different points of view regarding crimes and human rights as well as people from different countries with different justice systems and different penalties will feel different about it, but this is my review. I have a similar complain with Psycho-Pass, and I have it here as well, in that show it was questioned and somewhat explored, but here it is not.

Another minus in the show is having the same silly monologues of “I’m the great detective” whenever they enter these mental worlds, doing it once or twice would be fine but when you have the characters doing that all the time it comes off as silly, even more on a series that tries to be serious and dark as this one. Did I mention that they also have simple looking avatars that are way less cooler than how they look in the real life and that they also have silly quirks and personalities while they are there?

Anyways, during the first half of the show you have these people solving episodic cases which seem to be unrelated with the others at first and entering the minds of these criminals who the viewer never gets to really know something about, besides how messed up they are and their sadistic or emotional reasons behind their murders. And the agents can die and revive how many times they want in there so there aren’t really much consequences. Supposedly, every death has an impact on their real bodies but nothing major ever happens in the series regarding that, and their memories reset with every new logging so here we are with a circular pacing where they repeat the same thing, with the same silly monologue, often making the same mistakes, before finding and capturing the criminal with clear but not that anticipated resolutions.

Eventually all these seemingly unrelated cases are tied together through a same mastermind that manipulates people to turn them into criminals, so the main mystery is built on the background from the beginning, just with a slow pacing. And the show has the same issue as Erased, there’s no point in trying to build a who could it be mystery when you have one clear suspect, who in turn lacks screentime and presence throughout the show.

Unlike Erased though, the responsible and how was he hiding and what are his motives once he’s found out are found and explained in details, and it has nothing to do with killing people because of illusionary spider webs. But his reasons aren’t really much better, he’s a typical villain with a God complex and a morbid sense of justice. Light in Death Note was cool because he was explored, questioned, had a clear counterforce and ends up paying the price in different ways.

The villain in Paprika had somewhat pretentious monologues about the body supressing the mind before getting crazy and turning into a monster. Shogo Makishima had pretentious monologues as his excuse for making the people revolt against the system and he also had a clear connection to the main protagonists of the show, he was also killing people himself in ruthless ways and all of that made him a very memorable antagonist. And do I even need to talk about the antagonists in GitS? They had all of that as well as his political and philosophical ideal explored. This guy here have none of that and thus come off as a very forgettable and unimportant villain.

And the logic behind this worlds within minds change completely at the end when the show changes its rules completely with absent or rushed explanations and convenient outcomes, all of a sudden there are wells within wells, minds mixing with each other, more than one brilliant detective, effects from reality affecting the virtual worlds or viceversa, and more stuff like that. All of which ultimately leads to the resolution in a somewhat unsatisfying way. I still give it a pass, because the whole mechanism is almost brand new so it makes sense for them to not exactly know all about it, but if the show was actually longer it could introduce these just discovered aspects without feeling like the rules are being rewritten in convenient ways.

The resolution itself is not bad, it’s actually ok in terms of themes, the system they used is somewhat questioned and seen as bad but neccesary for good reasons, just like in the anime it takes inspiration from, where the status quo in maintained at the end. Rather, the problem lies on the rushed and convenient way it unfolds and how they captured the main villain.

At least there’s a very fleshed out protagonist, showing his mentality and how he’s slowly affected by everything, as well as his tragic backstory, and being a former agent and later on a criminal himself, it makes sense for him to know about all sorts of stuff regarding crimes in both their makings and their solvings, and he comes off with very reasonable courses of actions, thus he’s a capable and well established character. He can also be ruthless, which is rare for a protagonist nowadays. He’s so good he can use pissed coats with a serious expression and still remain cool.

The main girl is an oddball, despite being a moe looking petite girl with a pink hair clip, she’s actually 23 years old, is very curious about the mechanism, is actually smart, wants to look even in her own subsconciousness and even threatens or kill people at times, yet she also blushes when she gets kissed and have more moe traits in her. Thus she comes off as a kinda weird character that is kinda all over the place yet serviceable as a plot device and as an atypical legal loli with actual personality. As for the rest? Who cares about them? Outside of the main villain they do their job fine as plot devices but otherwise offers nothing in terms of characterization. They get to relate to the others in some ways but that is still not very looked into.

Visually speaking, the show has good looking backgrounds with creative directing and acceptable effects, and no real quality drops, and the actual animation is also well done, even better than expected for this type of show. The problem lies in the awful CGI and the horrible character designs, I already complained about the avatars but the actual designs suffer from bad in-between that constantly makes them go off model and when you are constantly watching at close up shots of deformed faces, it becomes very distracting, not on par with Magatsu Wahrheit or Japan Sinks, but still pretty bad.

The sound is good in every aspect, good sound effects and good music that sets up a good atmosphere and there are good insert songs with surprisingly good english. Both the opening and ending are fine, especially the latter, but they aren’t exactly memorable. The voice acting is well made, with every seiyuu fitting their characters just fine and there’s a very well made distortion effect for a certain virtual character, but seriously, having Kenjiro Tsuda as either a fucked up villain or a typical tough cool guy when he is not voicing a villain is used so much these days, it’s getting old by now, he may have sucked balls when he started as Kaiba and Aoba in Naruto, but at least he had more variety. It’s not bad, but it feels typical and unimpressive.

As a whole, I see nothing in this show that wasn’t already present and equally or better presented in the anime I compared it to and even if it stands out from being different than the trends of today, Winter had lots of episodic or semi episodic mystery shows at the same time (Pet, Kyoukou Suiri, Jeweler Richard, the last episodes of Babylon), so even in that regard, it is nothing special, nor it feels like it, and for that it won’t really be remembered. It’s not exactly bad, and it’s better than its contemporaries from the same season, but nothing that can’t be missed either.