What makes a show good? There are a lot of potential answers to that. Some shows are good because of their casts, groups of characters with loads of humanity who you love to watch. Others are good because of their plot, delivering an engaging narrative that you want to see through to its conclusion. Others can be good because of their visuals, especially action and choreography. Some even reach quality more for their worldbuilding than anything else.
But, one thing people attempting to make a good show sometimes miss is that while a show can be good for any of these reasons, it won’t be good if that one reason is the only thing it has going for it. The other important elements have to at least hit some level of basic competence or everything will break down.
Enter Qualidea Code, a show that tries pretty hard to build something good with its twists and scenario, but which does it on a foundation of sand thanks to utterly lacking many other points along the way.
Our opening brings us to The Future (TM). Earth has been ravaged by the arrival of dimensional alien monsters called the Unknown. When the Unknown attacked, all children were put into cryo-sleep for their own protection while the Adults took shelter the normal way. And yes, the show does expect you to just buy that as something that makes sense. I’m just going to say that no, it doesn’t make sense and is never made to make sense throughout the show’s run and then try to move on, because the whole plot is predicated on that being done en masse so we’ll be here forever if I complain about it every time I have to bring it up.
As it turns out, the kids who were put into cryo-sleep awaken with magical superpowers called “World”, derived from the worlds they saw/dreamed while they were down. This is probably for the best because the Unknown still control much of the world, leaving the defense of humanity’s bastion in Southern Kanto largely to the children and their massive abilities.
Our main character, Ichiya Suzaku, serves in this future as the head of Tokyo’s battle school defense force. He has the power to control gravity, which manifests primarily as the ability to fly combined with conjuring crackling purple orbs to fight with. He’s joined by his childhood friend Canaria, who possesses a World ability that lets her sing a magic song to empower her allies and who acts as his second. The other principle characters are the head-student pairs of the other defense cities: Maihime (with the power of SWORD BEAMS) and her second Hotaru (with the power of ranged sword slashing) in Kanagawa and siblings Asuha (with the power of fire and ice elemental pistols flagrantly borrowed from Demonbane) and Kasumi (with the power of… um… being a sniper) in Chiba.
There are a few things that bear mentioning at this point. For one, we’re never at any point let in on any connection between the cryo-sleep dreams of our characters. In fact, we never learn what kind of ‘world’ most of them saw in order to gain their World powers. This is a flagrant gutterball, as it practically gift-wrapped some fascinating multi-level development for literally any and all of the child characters and the show insultingly uses none of it. Second, it’s hard to miss that for all that we’re on six main characters there are basically only two personalities for them to share: Canaria and Maihime are high-energy chipper goofball idiots, while Hotaru and the Chiba siblings are dour, low-energy deadpan snarkers. There’s some modulation, like Canaria is meek and friendly while Maihime is explosive and outgoing, or Hotaru being less prone to snark and Kasumi far more, but by in large the archetypes do fit them like gloves. Ichiya is a little different – he’s an angry chuuni obsessed with being the lone hero strong enough to protect Canaria without help… when he’s alone. The instant he’s in the presence of other characters he’s just a slightly modulated deadpan snarker.
Combined, these issues give us a big problem with the show: the entire cast is shallow and two-dimensional at best, and most of them aren’t even fun to watch. Canaria’s positivity and optimism at least make her come off as a decent person despite being a total airhead, and as the show progresses I can at least see some chemistry with her and Ichiya. I suppose, for the others, they usually do get one or two good scenes (and no added depth, but at least good scenes), but Asuha and Hotaru usually add close to nothing, Maihime’s blockheaded nature usually prevents her from carrying scenes on her own, and Ichiya and Kasumi? They’re hard to watch.
On one hand, Ichiya and Kasumi are both snarkers to a great degree, they’re forced to work together, and they absolutely hate each others’ guts. Normally, this would be good for interplay and banter, indulging in the snark. However, they’re too legitimately hostile and not clever or fun enough to actually turn that into quality entertainment. They basically call each other trash and shit and that’s about it. They’re characters that are hard to watch, consequently, and the worse of the two (by virtue of being overbearing and angry all the time rather than bored, quiet, and lazy) is our technical main character. He’s not as bad as Daisuke from Revisions, in that Ichiya here doesn’t manage to totally ruin the show, but he has a lot of similarities as a grumpy delusional hero who fights with all his supposed ‘friends’ to that other grumpy delusional hero who fought with all his supposed ‘friends’.
In any case, the first couple episodes pretty much just get us used to the depressingly cookie-cutter fare where enemies with no known motivation and no real theme attack in blind and mindless waves and the lead characters have to hold them off. They even manage to slip in what amounts to a beach episode here, putting all the characters (especially the girls) in swimsuits for some underwater recon. I guess we do meet some other important folks here: Airi and Gutoku, the adults technically in charge of this mess, and Aoi, an extremely timid backline support girl who has a World that grants a sort of telepathy, receiving and sending images mind-to-mind.
The third episode introduces us to a more formidable enemy (a giant tower sort of thing) and death flags. Loads and loads of death flags. Ichiya, moron that he is, runs out the night before a joint operation against the tower in an attempt to solo it, but his Tokyo fellows catch wind and come out to support him. The enemy is still too much for them, at least when Canaria strains herself, overusing her power to protect and buff her boyfriend Ichiya to the point where she collapses, coughing up blood, and seems to be brought to death’s door.
For the record, this is literally the only time where any character, even Canaria, so much as hints at power overuse or backlash damage of any kind being a thing. It’s used right at the end of Episode 3 to put the cute girlfriend in peril for cheap drama, and then never comes up as a setting element ever again.
In any case, the following episode is mostly one big fight against the giant tower enemy and its swarm of mooks, except that every scene seems determined to raise another death flag for Canaria. Every cliched bit of dialogue seems primed to suggest that in some great tragic irony, she’s not going to pull through and has in fact already been killed… until she wakes up in the hospital, seemingly fine now, and convinces Aoi to take her (along with the other Tokyo friends) out to the battlefield so she can sing her song again and this time bring victory to dear Ichiya. Which she does with essentially no hardships blocking her way. Ichiya also learns a lesson about teamwork and friendship, having to use his gravity powers to add extra weight to Maihime’s sword in order for them to deal the finishing blow, which would have been a really spectacular combo attack if it wasn’t represented by turning the battle into a bad powerpoint presentation before a fade to white magically destroys the enemy.
Yeah, another persistent problem about Qualidea Code is found in the visuals. Most of the time the show looks pretty alright. The character designs are at least a little more engaging than their personalities, the Unknown are… not terrible for generic personality-deprived space monsters, being just a little less creative than the Vertex from Yuki Yuna is a Hero, and the show overall does have at least a couple nice splashy effects. Either their vision or their budget fell through in a big way, though, as pretty much every episode from here on and especially every big combat scene is full of cheap, janky animation and budget-saving tricks that together really drag the show down as a visual experience. I don’t know where exactly the weak link was – it could have been the writers not knowing how to describe what they wanted to happen, the director not being able to visualize what the writers produced, or the animators not being paid enough to bring that vision to life, but there’s regret to be had in any case.
The day is saved, Canaria is alive and well, and some time later we check in with her and Ichiya as she’s been discharged from the hospital. We also cut to Aoi and the adults here, where the adults seem to recognize that she and the rest of the rescue team passed through an exclusion zone and are now in danger if something isn’t done for them. On the side of our two leads, Ichiya actually goes so far as to honestly confess his feelings for Canaria. She smiles, starts to accept, but is cut off mid sentence by a loud “wham” that is strongly implied to have squashed her like a bug.
At about this point, there’s a solid chance you burst out laughing – not because Canaria’s death here is actually funny, but because it is so sudden and so poorly handled that there’s really no other response you can give. The scene with her and Ichiya seems like it would lead off the anime version of Monty Python’s Flying Circus – two characters are having this heartfelt talk and then down comes the Terry Gilliam foot with the music, the narrator, and so on. Surrealist humor doesn’t follow the same rules as other comedy, so suffice to say this emotionally unexpected and monstrously abrupt moment essentially qualifies.
And, okay, I’ll get a little ahead of myself here and say outright that no, Canaria is not actually dead. A clever viewer could probably predict that given how she’s all over the intro, she actually survived the incident that gave her about a million death flags (pro tip: surviving a scenario that gives you death flags gives you an equivalent amount of plot armor when it’s done. And Canaria’s death flag scenario was done as soon as the big tower enemy got Photoshopped to death), and we’re not treated to a shot of her mangled body or anything like that. However, everything in the body of the show wants you to believe she just died for at least a few episodes, so I don’t think it’s wrong to analyze this moment as a death scene.
And as a death scene for the pretty girlfriend character, it utterly fails. In addition to the Pythonesque nature of the moment’s pacing, there’s the fact that it doesn’t have the time or respect needed to milk the emotional impact of a big, important death. Up until this point, Ichiya is our main character, and it’s pretty well established that Canaria is his whole world. He wants to protect her, he wants to care for her, everything he does is given her as a motivation throughout the sequence leading up to this. This means that she is an insanely critical character if only to our lead, and therefore that her death should be properly world-shattering.
And, to do that, you can’t rely on surprise, or even the halfhearted attempt at suspense that the scene makes. Both the buildup and the payoff need to be good to make it both believable and effective. Here, the buildup is minor. We get the sense (from the adults’ worry and a faint beeping thing beeping faster in short cuts) that something is coming, but we have little sense of what it will be like when it arrives, so the suspense is more curious than fearful. For the event itself, it’s nothing, little more than a sound effect. We don’t even really see the thing from the sky that theoretically smashes poor Canaria into paste, we just hear it, and see the crater/pool of muddy and/or bloody water left behind. And, in terms of payoff, the episode was already overstocked (running right through the credits and beyond with this scene) and has to cut with only a couple seconds to react to what just happened. If we really cared, I guarantee we would not be done processing the scene when the show is done showing it.
If you wanted the sudden smash death to be how she goes out, which would normally be a dubious choice but is at least forced due to the fact that you can’t get into gore when she’s not actually dead (as otherwise this sort of setup would be a good time to use gore even in a work that doesn’t normally stray there), you needed to work on both sides. The start has the right idea, but tell us more about what having gone to the forbidden zone means, and what sort of threat might be coming. We have a lot of focus here on the chips on the back of these characters’ necks (for good reason), so with the vague cryptic talk I honestly thought the chip was going to malfunction and kill (or more likely just hurt) her, not that the enemy was going to somehow launch an attack that would be incongruous with every prior enemy attack.
You would also need to linger after the “kill” in order to get it to sink in properly. Again, that’s slightly harder with nothing to see in terms of a dead Canaria, but not impossible. As-is the show cuts one episode in seconds, and the next opens with a replay and gets us the anguished scream before launching into the bouncy opening and coming out of that into a scenario where Canaria is already ‘dead’ by some time. We need to see this as Ichiya sees it, as a crushing moment of horror. Let’s see the skysmasher enemy in that dropped down in all its gribbly glory, and Ichiya frozen in absolute disbelief and pain as it retreats. Let’s see more of his shocked face, and form a raw emotional connection with what he’s suffering. Let’s really hear that scream, and pan out to witness the fact that Ichiya is alone with a crater where the girl he just confessed his love to used to be. Let’s skip the happy silly opening with Canaria dancing to reinforce that she’s gone.
If you want to sell a kill on such a core and heavily plot-armored character, really sell it. You’re missing a lot of point otherwise. And please, try to not remind me of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
And with that, we basically enter show number 2. I hope you weren’t hoping to see Ichiya deal with his grief and really focus on his pain, because he basically falls out of the show. We do check in with him now and then, but over the next four episodes (that’s 5-8) I wouldn’t be surprised if he has less than 5 minutes of screen time in total. It might even be less than 2 minutes if you only count the time he’s actually in the scene and not being discussed by others while absent. So, essentially, he’s no longer the main character and we’re no longer telling his story. I guess it makes sense – his only reason to fight was to protect Canaria, so with her dead he doesn’t really have a purpose.
Instead, Maihime takes over both as main character and as interim chief of the shattered and downtrodden team Tokyo. Her genki goofball ways do lead to restoring some morale, but she’s got her own issues going (not that she really has the depth to portray them) having lost one friend in Canaria and being unable to save another, Ichiya, from being consumed by grief.
Meanwhile, we get more sinister hints from the adults. They replace Aoi’s chip and inform her that, of the group that circled around back through the forbidden zone, she’s the only one to survive. However, they play things very close to their chests about what actually happened and why, and seem to be rather obviously lying about some of it in what I’d like to call ‘setup for later’. Despite as much as she does know, Aoi is still spineless enough that when Hotaru drags her along to retrace their steps and attempt to figure out what ‘got’ Canaria and all the others who went with them, she doesn’t really resist or stop Hotaru from driving them right back into the Forbidden Zone, earning quite a few death flags for the two of them.
At the same time, a new attack arrives, including a massive portal in the sky centered on the Tokyo region. Maihime, as the ‘strongest’, fights on the front there in a huge way, raising more death flags for herself every time we cut back to her. It’s like the show is trying to get us numb to the death flags by spamming them out as hard as it possibly can. Ichiya, meanwhile, makes himself useful pretty much by being pointed at the enemies attacking Chiba and crushing in a generally forward direction. This relieves the Chiba siblings to join the chaos at Tokyo.
It’s in this conflict that we finally see the skysmashers, uncreatively designed fleshy cylinders that drop directly on their marks. Along with them there are some new, humanoid-type Unknown, including one of them who’s made out to be a boss and has a suspicious feminine build with a suspicious hair/cloak structure reminiscent of Canaria’s haircut and a weakening ability suspiciously reminiscent of Canaria’s empowering ability… but we’re supposed to not catch on to that for a little bit.
Hotaru magically senses that Maihime is in trouble, perhaps because Maihime’s death flags are stacking to the moon and are really loud and obvious, and turns the car around to go save her. Along the way she picks up Kasumi, who got separated from Asuha (literally due to his motorcycle sidecar getting cut off her motorcycle and her not noticing). I will say, the variety of scenarios in this big multi-episode battle are at least creative, even if the animation never quite lives up to actually bringing us to the scene. Eventually this ends in a daring scheme that converts a freeway into a massive ramp and sees Asuha freezing enemies in mid air with her ice shots so Hotaru can jump from platform to platform and get to Maihime, who’s fighting that totally-not-Canaria boss monster on top of a building in Tokyo.
Hotaru arrives and protects Maihime, but along the way her chip starts malfunctioning, causing her, right at the end, to hug Maihime and let them both get hit and seemingly killed by a retreating Unknown leviathan. Right before she departs, she talks to Kasumi the sniper, sending him a cut across his cheek and chip alike and, through the scope that’s then broken, a message to read her lips: “The whole world is fake”.
This part of the show, from Canaria’s ‘death’ to the ‘deaths’ of Hotaru and Maihime, could have been great. It had some very creative action set pieces, an absolutely mammoth scope to its battle, and the opportunities for good character as we took time to delve into flashbacks for Hotaru and Maihime, showing how they became who they are and why they have such a strong bond. Unfortunately, there are a few bothers to it. From their young kid forms to now, the Kanagawa duo are essentially static characters. We see them as little kids and we see them now as teens and technically there are transitions here, but any motion in their personalities is an illusion; they’re still flat, static characters who can’t really carry the material they’ve been handed outside the combat and their one ‘bit’ each. This wouldn’t be so bad if they were supporting or supported by better characters, but when they’re essentially doubled up with more of the same? It doesn’t quite land.
Further, the show can’t settle on a theme. It goes for cliched and operatic when it’s throwing up death flags or indulging in the over-the-top action cliches and set pieces, dark and gritty when the skysmashers are falling… or straight out comedic action lunacy at other times, like when we’re focused on the Chiba siblings. It goes from clown mode to blood and pain and back at the drop of a hat, and the sequence just can’t survive that. A whole show could: Gurren Lagann has some extreme clown action, but turns serious around important character deaths or epic ‘final’ battles. However, it keeps them essentially separate. We don’t take a few minutes off from dueling the Spiral King for the fate of the world to watch somebody else recreate a Looney Toons stunt, only to cut right back to the epic drama fight. Qualidea Code pretty much does that now and again, and it means you’re not really ready to laugh at the silly stuff nor are you fully invested in the dramatic stuff.
And, of course, the animation is still frequently subpar. I hate to harp on that again and again, but there are some things that need a bigger budget than others. Qualidea Code is a science fiction action show with aliens and powers and massive battles, you need to see and experience it for the show to work well. All together, the issues through here mean that while there are some good parts, the full package is nowhere near as strong as it could have been.
Anyway, with Maihime and Hotaru now gone, the Chiba siblings (particularly brother Kasumi) become our new main characters for the next arc. It is, essentially, a case of “and now for something completely different” for a bit as we spend an episode largely clowning around with the two of them and Aoi even as we meet an adult lady from HQ who seems even more sinister than the lying but still at least somewhat kindly duo of Airi and Gutoku. HQ lady wants to withdraw Asuha away from the primary defense line, and insincerely promises to get low-ranking Kasumi imported too, reckoning that it’s her bond with her brother that’s keeping Asuha at the front. Kasumi, meanwhile, is asked to do rounds with Aoi, provoking Ashua’s jealousy (we never quite confirm that they’ve got incestuous tendencies, but the show sure does hint at it sometimes), ultimately leading to him meeting HQ lady and getting invited to a later secret meeting.
At the same time, Kasumi has found that, with his damaged chip, his eyes don’t seem to see the same world. One sees everything as he’s always seen it, but the other now sees a world lit in hellish red, where a lot of things are more run-down and Unknown-ish than they should be. He takes his time investigating this, and the audience isn’t largely let in on his plans because he talks so rarely, but suffice to say we’re now exploring a mystery rather than worrying about fighting.
This brings us, ultimately, to the secret meeting. The lady from HQ reveals that the world the children see is, in fact, fake and that they’re being used for nefarious purposes, before trying to use her invisible tentacles to kill Kasumi for having gotten too close to the truth on his own. Naturally, though, he didn’t come alone like he was asked to, and Asuha busts in and reduces the evil HQ lady to ash. There is, kind of shockingly, basically no follow-up to this. They go about their business the next day like the boss of their bosses wasn’t a killer alien and that they didn’t just murder her.
It’s not for long, though, as another massive incoming of Unknown soon arrives. The onslaught convinces Ichiya to take up the fight again, but despite his strength it’s basically game over for the depleted forces of the tri-city area, meaning that the command is to fight for an orderly retreat, evacuating as many people as possible to the strongholds inland.
During the battle, two new “boss” class humanoid Unknown appear (flagrantly Hotaru and Maihime, having the same general outline and fighting style) and take on Asuha. Naturally, this is a losing battle for her, ending with her chip surgically destroyed by the slim elite (Hotaru). Meanwhile, Kasumi appears to Ichiya to go insane, sniping adults to death rather than the enemy. Ichiya goes to fight him but doesn’t go all out, demanding some sort of explanation that Kasumi, in full snark mode, refuses to provide in any sort of sensible manner. In his defense, he’s probably right when he says that Ichiya wouldn’t believe him anyway. While they fight, the previous humanoid elite (the Canaria one) appears. As hilariously tragic as it would have been, Ichiya doesn’t fight that enemy, instead being determined to beat up Kasumi.
This ends when Kasumi begins to sing Canaria’s song, and then declares that he’d never heard it before. The eerie wailing of the unknown starts to sound like the song to Ichiya, probably because it is, and he collapses, weeping, as the unknown approaches, reaches carefully around, and shatters his chip. This causes him to see the true world in full, including Canaria alive, well, and holding him.
It drags out a little long, but the reunion is actually a kind of nice scene. It’s too bad it doesn’t last. We next find ourselves on a human warship off the coast, the home base of the human effort for the reconquest of southern Kanto, and a lot of stuff quite reasonably happens more or less at once.
For one, we get the proper exposition of what happened in this show. We’re still expected to buy the whole “put all the kids in cryo sleep while the adults flee because this is somehow better and safer” thing, but apparently that played right into the plans of the Unknown. The Unknown, we’re told, are inhuman and mostly incomprehensible, but they did seem to want human children, in order to turn those children into more beings like themselves as the Unknown are otherwise incapable of reproduction. To this end, they established their base over the territory they could hold and put down loads and loads of perception filters: over the territory so humans looking in could not, at first, see anything other than shadowy demons, and via those chips into the children they recruited, making those kids see Unknown as humans and unchipped humans as Unknown. Traveling into the forbidden zone caused the chips to malfunction, which also let the humans pinpoint those children (like Canaria) for rescue by the automated drones that were sent into the corrupted zone. Now, with almost all the stolen children rescued and the first line of the Unknown defense broken, the time has come for the adults to take point and destroy the Unknown dimensional portal in order to permanently end their threat. It’s a quickly told exposition that is full of logical holes, but it’s what we’ve got.
We also meet the leader of the human offensive, a tiny and practically teen-looking lady who happens to be mother of Asuha and Kasumi. In personality she’s basically a carbon copy of Maihime (since this show has only two character types) but at least she has some half decent interplay with her long-lost children.
And if you were hoping to get some good scenes between Ichiya and Canaria, paying off the interrupted love confession and the tearful reunion, I am sorry to report that they go immediately back to the status quo from episode 1 where Canaria is affectionate (though perhaps more than ever, freely saying that she loves Ichiya) and he’s… a little tsundere about it, unable to deny that he has powerful feelings but also unwilling to lose his cool by admitting anything. Out of all the gutterballs in this show, this one might be the most annoying to me personally. Not only is this a case where the childhood friend ship actually works out for her, but the character growth for both Ichiya (who had to come to terms with how much Canaria meant to him by living in a world without her, which he found to be meaningless) and Canaria (who had to come into her own and fight for Ichiya rather than being the one saved and protected, since she was on the outside) is practically gift-wrapped for the show. There are countless ways you could express the changes between them, and what it means for them to be back together, but Ichiya spinning her around with his gravity powers when the topic moves onto feelings in order to dodge the conversation just like he did at the start of the show is not one of them.
Aoi is on the outside too, but she’s got a point of her own to make. In her own meek and mousy way, she objects to how the real human adults are taking on the end of the war, remembering how well and earnestly Gutoku and especially Airi cared for them for the years they were in the distorted world. She makes a quite earnest plea that not all Unknown are unforgivably evil and that there must be another way, but her small-voiced pleas fall on deaf ears, especially where the commander is concerned.
We get a battle with the outer defenses of the Unknown, including real versions of all the units that were illusions over drone fighters before (yeah, canonically the kids did not, in fact, kill hundreds of people because all the firepower sent into the zone until Canaria, Maihime, and Hotaru was unmanned), which like the fighting in the middle of the show is good enough but hamstrung by its technical failings. Ultimately, the path is open to the central base of the Unknown where the remaining stolen children are held (put back into cryosleep for their own safety by Airi and Gutoku, who also take out the other Unknown to make their stand, hoping the war will end with their deaths) and the portal that the Unknown use to manifest in the world is. Deciding that however this fight is to end, it’s theirs to finish the kids all tear off and go on a commando mission themselves.
During this mission the team (consisting of all six main characters plus Aoi) split up. Hotaru and Maihime follow a trail of dead Unknown to the cryosleep vault, where they face a particularly strong-seeming humanoid Unknown (Airi, though it’s not as obvious as the fakes) that waits to challenge them while the others go to take out the portal and face Gutoku as their nemesis. Gutoku, it turns out, is a human quisling rather than a proper Unknown (having met Airi and fallen for her as a “goddess”), but his body has been augmented with grafts to give him his own final boss powers that, while perhaps not competitive with top-end World abilities, at least let him no-sell bullets.
Of course, this should mean he’s still deleted pretty quickly given all the powers on the board, but Aoi turns traitor as well. She takes off her glasses, adopting a cruel, confident personality completely unlike her former self, and uses her telepathic ability to flood the subconscious of the other kids with enough random garbage to lock away their ability to use their World powers. She then books it, forcing the party to split again as Canaria and Asuha chase Aoi down to stop the DDoS and turn their powers back on while the boys try to hold out against Gutoku. This, however, ends up being more of a three-way split as Canaria gets lost and stumbles her way up to the top of the spire where the portal is instead of chasing Aoi.
In terms of action moments, the three-part final battle (Team Kanagawa versus Airi Unknown, Team snarkers versus mutant Gutoku, and Asuha versus the now staggeringly competent at hand-to-hand Aoi) is probably the best done in the show. It still has some animation faults, but perhaps because it’s contained more than the other big battles, there aren’t as many of them that screw things up as critically, and the flow of the individual fights is well done while the three lines are decently woven together.
In the end, it seems like all the heroes are on the ropes: Maihime and Hotaru beaten within an inch of their lives, Asuha getting wrestled down by Aoi, and the boys being slammed with doom wind by Gutoku. This is when Canaria finds herself at the top, and starts to sing. Though her World ability is locked off, the mundane reminder of her presence inspires all the heroes to remember what they’re fighting for and push a little harder. Maihime and Hotaru hit their second wind, giving Maihime the opening to deal the death blow to their Unknown foe. Asuha struggles harder, rebuking Aoi and putting her in a chokehold to knock her out and end her lockdown of their World abilities. And, above, Ichiya stands tall and pushes back against Gutoku’s magic wind until, with Aoi knocked out, his powers come back on. At the same moment, Gutoku realizes that Airi has died (cutting to Maihime, who also finds a trinket she left with Airi way back when she was throwing up death flags) and lets himself be destroyed, the portal collapsing without Airi to sustain it. We’re also briefly told that Airi is a load bearing boss, leading to a chaotic and quick retreat in which the kids in cryo sleep are presumably rescued, the ghost of Airi appears to the surprisingly not dead Gutoku and tells him to take care of the also not dead Aoi so she doesn’t have to lose both her parents (rocks then fall on Gutoku and Aoi, but it’s hard to imagine they’d die from that little), and all’s well that ends well.
Our final scene, then, sees the group gather back in the tri-city area, now clear, where they’ve built a small grave for Airi, eulogizing her while reaffirming their intents to help rebuild the world, using their powers for good.
In the end it had some good ideas, but the execution was mostly incompetent. They tried to hold together broken pieces of The Matrix or Dark City with stale battle school anime cliches and characters as deep as a kiddie pool for glue. Some of it is fun to watch but none of it has the weight it wanted to. If this mess was going to work, and that’s a surprisingly small if, it needed its characters to be more deep and compelling and its surface plot to be more tortured and thought-provoking and less overwhelming beam spam. It needed to set a tone and atmosphere.
Even if you keep Canaria as the sweet ditzy bard she is, the world should have been much more oppressive and the bent much more psychological. If anything, she would have stood out much more and the brightness of her character and its loss for most of the middle would have been more powerful if she was a beacon of hope in a world that felt on the brink most of the time, not just at random occasions.
There are a lot of similarities between this 12-episode anime and the first couple arcs of RahXephon: characters belong to a certain world, then are rescued from it through a process that doesn’t seem a whole lot like rescue to discover that they had previously lived under the thumbs of human impostors, some of which there are still awkward connections with. But RahXephon, while it did also allow its characters to laugh and smile now and again, felt heavy, dark, and majestic, really owning up to its themes even as the reset ending let it down. Stripped to the bare bones outline of the story, this show probably has the stronger structure, but nothing past the skeleton really makes use of that.
It’s a shame. I’d love to see something actually make use of the deception and the double world. It might be particularly interesting if some characters started to see, but had to deal with not knowing for certain what was real and what was fake – somewhat like Kasumi’s arc, but stretched out and without an obvious solution. There have been shows that deal with questionable reality, making both characters and viewers wonder what they should trust. But these shows, things like Serial Experiments Lain or Ergo Proxy, are mostly slower mysteries. It could be particularly engaging to have that sort of play in an action show, when lives are on the line and decisions have to be made in the heat of the moment, rather than after carefully examining the evidence.
Further, while the characters are flat and dry, they’re flat and dry because they were never given more than their basic treatments, not because they had to be bad. Canaria is actually quite functional as a character. Even if she is flatly sweet and affectionate and generically airheaded, that’s to an extent the kind of character you want for her role, and she’s entirely inoffensive. Kasumi and Maihime could be fun characters in their own right if they had more depth and in Kasumi’s case a somewhat better sense of fun. I mentioned Gurren Lagann before, and that’s a show that relies very much on having loud characters with loud personas that, like the cardboard cutouts here, are instantly recognizable and easy to pin down to their memes and cliches.
But, unlike Qualidea Code, the characters in Gurren Lagann actually have depth that gets explored when there’s a good opportunity for it. Nia, like Canaria, is mostly a bubbly optimist, but her relationship with both her father and how she discovers the world make her more than that. Yoko and Asuha are both tough gunslinger girls but while Asuha has at best passable relationships with her mother and brother, Yoko has a pretty intricate web of associations with other characters, including both her romance with Kamina and her more mundane relationships with the rest of the team, as well as her place in the world especially post-time-skip. And speaking of Kamina, both he and Maihime are boisterous sorts with more spirit than sense, leading from the front, but Kamina has (and refuses) a certain pathos in his self-awareness of what he is and how that conflicts with the world he finds himself in. Unlike Maihime, Kamina has enough of a developed persona to have doubts and vulnerabilities, even if he largely isn’t held back by those human frailties. Maihime has one crying scene and not much else.
But, all that said, how good or bad is Qualidea Code? It’s got good ideas and its plot has a good skeleton. Even the questions about how bad the Unknown really are could be compelling if they were delivered with the same weight as, say, the concerns about the difference between Mulians and humans in RahXephon. But the faults are critical and they are numerous. The characters range from good enough to downright obnoxious, the animation can be pretty at times but all too often breaks down, the scenario is predicated on some insane leaps of logic, and there are tons of elements, both plot or setting details like the nature of the World powers or the depths of the Unknown and emotional motions like the relationship between Canaria and Ichiya or the long but overall dry background of Maihime and Hotaru that are presented but don’t really go anywhere or pay off the way their setup should. Add in some really botched moments like Canaria’s ‘death’ or Aoi’s transformation into Evil Aoi for no bloody reason or the drive out to the Forbidden Zone, and you have a recipe for disaster made out of some percentage quality ingredients, nothing more.
For all of that, I think the final grade Qualidea Code deserves is D+. It is, when you get down to it, entirely watchable. There was no point where Ichiya got so annoying that I wanted to turn the show off, no point where the animation was so bad for so long that the entertainment value entirely fell through, no character so flat that you really wanted to boo them off the screen. There’s even some reason to watch it, to access those orphaned and misused parts and digest them properly… but I still wouldn’t recommend it. At best, Qualidea Code is good fodder for the experience of mocking something incompetently put together, something to be enjoyed ironically or else pillaged by better creators in search of spare parts to use. It comes frustratingly close to some degree of actual quality, but at every point its reach exceeds its grasp, so if you’re looking for a show that’s actually worth watching, keep looking.