So, this one has a kind of odd pitch – we follow a sour musician, the superpowered human incarnation of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, and said human incarnation’s ordinary older sister as they take a road trip across the United States. Complicating everything is the fact that in this retro-futuristic world, which looks vaguely like the 1950s in its automobiles, architecture, and general style but is more like the 2050s in terms of its actuality and in some senses technology, everything has gone to hell thanks to the arrival of of squiggly black monsters who hate and hunt down music and can only be fought off by the magic music people and the conductors who guide them. Oh, and the whole thing is basically a prequel to a mobile game.
This probably sounds both patently insane and like it’s cruising for disaster, but give it time.
Our introduction to the world and the facts about it isn’t actually that much less abrupt than my summary. The show cold opens with the trio of main characters pulling into a roadside diner somewhere in the “roadrunner cartoon” deserts east of Vegas, when the younger of the two girls (called either Cosette or Destiny) senses the proximity of the squiggly black monster things (Called D2) and smashes right through the wall to go beat them up, much to the annoyance of her conductor, Takt, and her big sister, Anna.
This whole interchange gets us a lot of bits to put together, like how music is outlawed for normal people (given how it attracts the D2), how there’s something abnormal about Cosette/Destiny other than the whole “Being a weird music-themed magical girl Fate servant” thing (called a Musicart), the fact that Takt loses one of his arms when she goes into super mode (it outright vanishes), and a general feel of what the world is like and what our characters are like.
I’ve already sort of addressed the world, technically existing in the future but representing a dated yet idealized sort of Americana if not for all the monsters and corruption, so how about the characters.
Destiny is… kind of a robot, in terms of how she reacts to things. That is to say, she’s very flat affect and very matter-of-fact most of the time. All the same, unlike some flat affect characters (or even pink-haired music-associated flat-affect characters who wear mostly red), She’s actually got a lot to say. She likes sweets, and if she doesn’t like needling Takt then she’s doing things very badly, because she needles him more or less constantly. So at least there are things that I know about Destiny right from the outset to make her a little interesting.
Takt, on the other hand, is an aloof, perhaps even arrogant musical prodigy who doesn’t think about much other than getting his hands on a piano and playing unless he’s forced to. He’s a perpetual sourpuss and wouldn’t be much fun to watch if the show didn’t know this. It does, and it often makes him the butt of the joke in lighter moments, which makes him a lot more bearable. It also helps that he has shockingly good on-screen chemistry with Destiny, the two playing off each other pretty well in most of the scenes they share.
Lastly, Anna is the eternally frustrated voice of reason. And why not? She’s in the driver seat with a piano-maniac and a sweets-addicted shell of a little sister on a cross-country road trip interrupted by monster attacks and property damage. She does spend an unfortunate lot of the show as the mild complainer, but despite that not being a glorious role she does it with minimal annoyance and it is rather important to add some balance to our main cast.
And, right here, let’s talk about the D2. One of the things that grew on me over the course of the show was the design for the D2 enemies. In a lot of ways, they remind me of the good parts of the work that went into the Grimm – that is, they have a very clear theme that’s visually represented so that you always know you’re looking at this particular class of monster, but there’s variety in the individual monsters so at least you get different kinds of creatures from episode to episode rather than loads of copy-paste goombas (a problem I had with the earlier bits of Shikizakura).
That visual theme is somewhat reminiscent as well, with the D2s having forms that are mostly similar in shape to terrestrial animals (with the most common being somewhat ape-like), with mask-like structures in place of any sort of face and a limited color palette – a cool and heavily saturated blue-black-violet sort of color scheme rather than the Grimm’s high-contrast black and white with red and yellow accents.
Are the D2s compelling villains? No, not at all. They’re mindless monsters that just sort of attack things that annoy them or are otherwise in their way. They’re just sort of there, and the characters have to deal with and account for that. But, at least, they’ve got good designs to their monstrosity.
In any case, starting with episode 2, we actually tell the story from the beginning. It starts with Takt in his nebulously-west-coast home that’s, again, right out of the 1950’s in style, living in his nebulously-west-coast 1950’s-style town. He’s a sour loner who spends hours playing the piano in his presumably soundproofed garage, interrupted only by Anna and Cosette, who seem to be his friends or possibly keepers. Takt is very sour because after the death of his father (the conductor of a great orchestra, killed by D2 at a concert that was supposed to be safe), public music performance was banned for public safety and he’s had to live ever since both alone and with the one thing that brings him happiness shoved into the shadows.
Anna, for her part, is basically the same person we met in Episode 1, but Cosette is not. This Cosette, you see, is not Destiny. She’s Anna’s little sister, a fun-loving and energetic young lady who has made it her mission to get Takt out of his shell, invading his personal space as many times as it takes to convince him to not be so downright surly. The difference between Cosette as Cosette and Cosette as Destiny is night and day; there’s not a shred of this girl that could be described as “flat affect”. We spend the better part of the episode just doing slice of life with the trio, mostly Takt and Cosette, which comes to a point when the Symphonica rolls into town.
What is the Symphonica, you may ask? Well, it’s kind of complicated and I’m not 100% sure I understand their full structure even with the whole show, but the basic deal seems to be that the Symphonica is the organization that manages the Musicarts and their Conductors, and this is the world’s first and only line of defense against the D2 menace. However, when D2s are not a clear and present threat, it seems like they roll out the bread and circuses, as their arrival in this episode is to organize a town fair, since this place is supposed to be safe enough to support live music and general merriment.
Cosette, since she likes Takt and his music, wants Takt to play for the festival. He initially refuses, but she signs him up anyway, hands out fliers, and even makes sure to move his piano out to the stage on festival day just to make sure. When Takt is late to the party, she even manages to open the performance, playing a little classical of her own before Takt arrives, insists that she picked the wrong music for a celebration, and joins her in a four-hands duet (something he, earlier in the episode, said he’d never do as part of telling her to buzz off) of a more upbeat tune. Their jam session is allowed to go on for a while, as you get a sense of the connection between the two of them, and even end up seeing Takt give an earnest smile. Yeah, I said Takt and Destiny have good screen chemistry, and they do, but the flashback here really sells that Takt and Cosette had great chemistry as well.
And yeah, that’s past tense. If you’ve been paying attention, you’re liable to realize that Takt has too many arms and Cosette too much of a human soul, so things are bound to go south in a hurry. And south they go when a D2 appears and attacks the stage. In the sudden onslaught, Takt almost certainly would have been killed like his father before him, but Cosette took the brunt of the hit for him, leaving her dying in what’s left of his arms. As Cosette’s life slips away, Takt begs for her salvation, and something strange and mystical happens.
Though it’s one of the big mysteries of Takt Op Destiny, we never do get an explanation of how and why Destiny arrives here. We see the event, and there are even some clues in it – Cosette had a weird pendant, that seems to be the nucleus of Destiny’s arrival, and her and Anna’s absent eldest sister is a researcher working for the Symphonica, so maybe that has something to do with it? In any case, a weird Cosette-ish spirit appears, takes Takt’s injured arm clean off, and then enters Cosette proper, reanimating her as the Musicart Destiny… who has no memory of or continuity with her mortal life as Cosette.
So, briefly, Destiny tears into the D2s attacking the town, and does a fair job before she and Takt are both rescued by a semi-independent conductor named Lenny and his Musicart Titan, but we’ll get back to them once we’ve talked about the elephant in the room that is Cosette/Destiny.
Because, in several senses, Cosette is stone dead while in others she is very much alive. Neither the memory nor personality of Cosette seems to survive in Destiny, but that is Cosette’s body walking around and talking with people. At times she can seem like she has some similarities, but are those echoes or just coincidences? Anna, certainly, wants to believe that her little sister is still alive and can be fixed up, if they can just get her to big sis in New York. Takt is also clearly suffering from having lost Cosette, but at first he’s quite cold to Destiny (even more than he’s cold to everyone), seeming to see her as an offensive counterfeit rather than the real thing.
The question of who and what Destiny is underscores a lot of the show. It’s discussed at points, but mercifully not talked to death, so you can mostly just enjoy the story around it. It is, however, a really good philosophical question to frame these characters around, and it’s approached as much as it is approached in an intelligent way. It’s not the meat of Takt Op Destiny, but the question of Cosette is certainly a lovely garnish.
In any case, Lenny and Titan! Lenny is a Conductor who, while seemingly connected to the Symphonica and able to speak to their power structure, doesn’t seem to be an ‘insider’. He goes off on his own, doesn’t wear the uniform, and so on. At the very least, they keep him on a long leash. Personally, he’s a pretty chill dude who seems to be interested in taking good care of the people he encounters, sort of like everyone’s big brother or extra father figure. Titan is a Musicart who has more of a “small and cute” vibe going on, but she’s absolutely deadly with her shotgun (as might be expected). She’s energetic and friendly, easily connecting with people and referring to them in fairly casual manners. Between the two of them, they bring more than enough positivity to offset the general Takt crew.
Lenny shows Takt the ropes of being a Conductor, leading a currently extremely willful and extremely single-minded Destiny to do the thing she wants to do and fight D2. Anna tries to come to terms with things, mostly by convincing Destiny to accept being called Cosette and to call her “big sister”. She also teaches Destiny what sweets are, and the enjoyment is immediate. Lenny also suggests (not the idea might not have occurred to them anyway, given the eldest sister) that they go to New York, because Destiny seems to be in an unstable state and possibly feeding off Takt’s life force, and the Symphonica main base should be able to “tune” her to deal with… whatever her problem is. Anna even holds out hope that, since Musicarts are usually prepared for years and don’t lose their minds entirely, that they might even be able to bring the old Cosette back.
Thus, the lot head off, initially with Lenny alongside. They part ways with Lenny and Titan after an incident in Vegas where a corrupt official runs an underground casino, which gets busted up by Takt and Destiny on one side and Lenny and Titan on the other. The split brings us back to episode 1, and we then move on to continued journeys after that.
This sees Takt’s car meet up with a Symphonica-aligned train and get a lift. The train is under the command of a sinister-seeming conductor named Schindler, who controls the Musicart Hell. Hell, perhaps fitting her name, is about the most obvious villain sort of individual you could get, with a sinister theme to her appearance, a constant slasher smile, and a manner that just exudes nastiness. Despite this, she’s a lot of fun to watch. Hell is one of those antagonists who is clearly having fun with their evilness, and is one of the cases where that fun translates into the audience having fun. She’s not even remotely relatable and not really dimensional (though we do get to see an interesting note or two out of her as the show goes on), but she’s entertaining.
There’s another Musicart on the train as well – Valkyrie, who has no Conductor at the moment. In a battle to protect the train, Hell gives Takt a little advice, suggesting that he should forcibly take control of Valkyrie. Oddly enough, Takt doesn’t. He and Destiny fight alongside her and manage to win with some clever strategy, earning Valkyrie’s trust and respect but not adding her to the party. I’m pretty sure this curious scene was left in as a plant for future Gacha elements (remember, this whole thing is technically a mobile game prequel, not that it feels like one), but the way Hell gives her advice really does help establish how twisted she is.
On parting with the train, Schindler tries to make Takt an offer to join him, but Takt is bluntly unaware of the conspiratorial maneuvering (not that Schindler realizes he’s ignorant, traveling with the sisters of a Symphonica head researcher as he is) and is really only concerned with playing Piano, so he turns Schindler down rather rudely, earning the enmity of said petty little bully.
Shortly after, the crew arrives in a largely depopulated and aging New Orleans. Here we get an episode with no D2 fighting and just a lot of character building with a side of music. Anna and Destiny leave Takt in the car to run some errands, but they get caught in a Good Samaritan fetch quest, helping out all the old people who still inhabit New Orleans. Takt, meanwhile, has his piano senses tingle and ends up discovering an underground jazz speakeasy, complete with some folks who can’t forget when Takt’s father was in town, conducting a whole orchestra to play Rhapsody in Blue. We get to see a lot more of what Takt’s dad was like, how he and his music touched a lot of lives, and something of how Takt seems burdened with his past and yet not burdened unwillingly, as he plays Rhapsody in Blue himself for the secret club. He gets a parting gift of some blank music sheets, which draws him to the idea of composing his own music rather than simply playing.
As they proceed into the South and up the eastern seaboard, the gang starts to work out their issues. Destiny seems to be acting more and more human of her own volition, and apparently even has gained some interest other than smashing D2, as she does her best to support Takt’s efforts to write music, finding him a small melodica so he can at least play something safe-ish to work on it. Destiny also has an important talk with Takt where she separates herself from Cosette despite acknowledging that she inhabits Cosette’s body, and wants to know what the original Cosette meant to the ones who knew her.
Before we spend too long on this soul-searching, though, D2 activity catches the attention of Takt and Destiny. At the center of the awakening horde, they find none other than Schindler and Hell, the latter of which has the ability to produce a magic tuning fork that draws in the D2 and wakes them from the slumber they’d largely been in. The bad guys are also kind enough to confirm that this is hardly the first time they’ve used the ability, and the D2 attack where Cosette got killed was another of their setups. This, naturally, causes Takt to see red (though it’s awesome to see him actually care) and he and Destiny engage battle against Hell.
This doesn’t go so well for Takt, and he gets mauled good, causing Destiny to take him and disengage, valuing his life over victory. While they hide out in a cave they have a good talk about what Cosette did mean to Takt and how without her he feels like he has no one to compose or play for – by the same token acknowledging Destiny as her own person rather than a continuation, imitation, or copy. At the same time, Lenny and Titan arrive and meet up with Anna, who’s starting to realize that something bad is going down.
This leads to both Destiny (on her own, not willing to risk Takt) and Lenny and Titan encountering Schindler and Hell for round 2, which has the tables turned on it by the arrival of Takt to power Destiny up. Before Hell can get really serious, though, another Musicart appears: Heaven, a Musicart bound to the leader of the Symphonica, Sagan, who has a message to deliver: Schindler’s being a naughty boy and disobeying orders has been noticed, so he’s being stripped of his rank and authority. It also turns out that (fittingly, as he hated music) Schindler was never a conductor in the first place, and Hell was just following him around pretending to be his Musicart because that’s what her real master, Sagan, wanted. Thus, the battle is disengaged with Schindler receiving the full humiliation conga – satisfying for a villain as pointlessly petty as he was. However, Takt’s condition (the long-term Destiny-sourced one, not the fact he got the crap kicked out of him) seems to be getting worse.
As bad an omen as that is, the gang does at least finally make it to New York, where we meet up with the wheelchair-bound eldest sister, Lotte, and she runs some tests on what the hell is going on with Takt and Destiny. The answer seems to be that their bond can’t be broken, at least not by any technique that the Symphonica possesses at present, but if they take a noncombatant life style, they should last quite a bit longer, and perhaps there would be more that could be done for them in the long term. If that wasn’t bad news enough, the sound of Hell’s tuning fork rings in the subways of the otherwise peaceful New York City, and Lenny has some dirt he’s uncovered on the Symphonica and the death of Takt’s father to share.
The next episode starts with Sagan arriving to interrupt the conversation and, ominously, with a lot of backstory for Lenny – how he was an apprentice of Takt’s father, how that made him who he was, how he was shattered by the man’s death, and how Sagan brought him into the Symphonica and he distanced himself from the organization out of suspicion regarding Sagan. Sagan pretty much confirms all of this, and with both Heaven and Hell under his command, attacks. The battle goes south when Takt collapses, unable to sustain Destiny’s fighting ability, and when Heaven tries to finish him off, Lenny takes the bullet for him.
After this, Lenny gets a pretty badass sendoff, conducting for Titan as she goes into serious business mode and beats Heaven within an inch of her life, forcing Sagan to withdraw. Lenny dies, but before he does, Takt acknowledges him as his mentor, meaning that Lenny can go out with a smile at having passed on what was given to him.
Given how weak Takt and Destiny have become, Lotte suggests putting them in suspended animation, but before that can actually be accomplished, Sagan goes ahead and does evil things, conjuring massive black crystals from the heart of the Symphonica building, turning it into a hellish D2 nest. The climax of the show has Takt, Destiny, and Titan trying to break in to save Anna and Lotte and stop Sagan, while Anna, Lotte, and eventually Valkyrie do their best to get the hell out of the underground base that’s now swarming with monsters.
The two groups run into each other, allowing Anna to confess her feelings for Takt (as frustrated as that makes her) before Takt and Destiny head on to take on the final boss, despite being in no condition to do so.
Before they get to Sagan, though, they of course run into Heaven and Hell. The former is still hurt from getting owned by Titan, and so the pair of Musicarts fuse into a new ultimate form, Orpheus in Hell, who Destiny holds off so that Takt can go on and confront Sagan.
We do at least get a brief explanation from Sagan as to why he is the way he is – essentially, he saw the horrors of war with the D2, it broke him, and he decided to use the entire North American continent as a sacrifice (along with the Symphonica and Sagan himself), drawing in all the D2 and then sealing them away. Takt, naturally, rejects his logic in favor of wanting to fight for music (and his friends) while Destiny battles Orpheus in Hell. Eventually, Destiny is able to triumph and comes to support Takt, to which Sagan largely accepts getting offed (not that he, impaled on crystals, could really fight back without his Musicart). The giant doom crystal structure crumbles, the D2 are able to be scattered, and the building is in a bad way because that was more or less a load-bearing Sagan.
We catch up with Takt and Destiny, out of immediate danger on the shore but at the brink of death from overexertion. Takt hums a tune Destiny doesn’t recognize, and tells her when she asks that it’s his composition for her, which he was finally able to finish. As Takt slips away, Destiny both affirms her feelings and does the one thing that could save him: she sacrifices herself, dissolving away leaving only Cosette’s pendant that started this whole thing behind, and giving Takt enough life to reach the point where friendlies find him to place him into suspended animation to convalesce.
Some time later, we get our final stinger: for Takt’s sake, Anna is now working as a Conductor for what’s left of the Symphonica. But, with the pendant, she’s not just a conductor, and is able to take a Destiny-style Musicart form herself, standing on the front line until such a time as Takt can return to her. Thus, bittersweet, is the end of the show.
Takt Op. Destiny has all the makings of a good story. It has fluid, flashy action, at times on par with something like a Fate show would provide. It has strong, memorable characters who go through real challenges that change who they are and it explores them enough that we’re there with them as they go through their trials. It has funny moments, and it has sad moments, and both of them work. It knows when to lay things on heavy and when to actually take a breather. It’s not a perfect show, but a solid understanding of the fundamentals goes a long way, so that I can at least say that it doesn’t have any really major faults. At worst, you could say the villains are a little anemic, or it might be hard for some people to roll with the premise, but the show sells it well enough for what it is.
All this in, recall, a glorified trailer for a phone game. I have to say, I’d probably like Takt Op. Destiny regardless, but there’s an extra degree to which it’s impressive coming from such a rightly maligned source. Just about the only moments that at all feel like they belong to a product like that are the brief moment where Hell suggests forcibly taking control of Valkyrie (which I went over) and the fact that the ending is rather open and leaves things in an arguably more interesting place (which would be fine even for an independent show). Everything else ranges from standard to good.
In the end, Takt Op. Destiny is a B+ from me. While I still don’t think it’s a big problem, the fact that Schindler and Sagan don’t really do all that much lifting for the plot while still technically being main-line villains, and Sagan in particular doesn’t have a lot going for him, does sort of put a cap on how far the show can go. If the two characters were merged into someone really cool and diabolical, without Schindler’s petulant child vibes or Sagan’s kind of nonsensical martyr plan, we could have had a stronger show. I suppose there’s a degree to which Takt, as a character, was always going to brush off some level of antagonism, but he does get worked up about the villains causing the deaths of Cosette and his father, and it already does help show him connecting more with his human side that he does. I think that’s what the show would have really needed to push it over the top, a strong and compelling rivalry or enmity.
But, as is, I’d recommend the show well enough.