Ah, Texhnolyze – a show brought to you by some of the creative forces involved in the legendary Serial Experiments Lain. It has a style somewhat between that of Lain and that of Ergo Proxy, with far less dialogue than either and a tone that’s a fraction as merry. When it comes to early 2000’s philosophically-minded cyberpunk head trips, Texhnolyze is certainly… um… well it’s certainly one of them, and possibly the one that goes the most all-in with its unique elements. That’s for better or for worse, mind you.
This can be noticed immediately. The first couple episodes follow a few plots. In one, a pit fighter, Ichise, offends his fight promoter by turning down getting his eye plucked out by a woman he’s prostituted to. He attempts to flee but his owners are from a mafia-style group who come after him. One member wants to torture and execute him, but the boss, with his own sort of honor, opts to instead take an arm and a leg from Ichise (quite literally, via sword) and leave him to live or die as he will. He drags his crippled self, severed limbs and all, through the slum of a city in which he lives until he encounters a strange doctor. Doc (as she’s called) takes Ichise in and, despite him not exactly consenting to the procedure, gives him a mechanical prosthetic arm and leg. These limbs are referred to as being “Texhnolyzed”, as are people with the bionics, which also include brain modifications to provide feedback and a heads-up display. Since that’s a direct reference to the title, you might guess the concept is fairly important.
Even after Ichise leaves Doc’s lab (largely via threatening her with bloody violence for her mad scientist creeper ways), his story is almost completely silent. In the first couple of episodes, this is downright oppressive, and also interesting and unique, as the entire story is told without anything that resembles normal dialogue, mostly through the warped visuals that indicate, more than anything, how Ichise is experiencing his world. Right at the start it makes the show stylistic and difficult to approach and really dig into. I wouldn’t call it pretentious (at least, not yet) but it’s certainly putting how differently it tells its story first.
I sort of contrast this with the other two touchstones I mentioned in my opening paragraph: Ergo Proxy starts out seeming like a sci-fi dystopia, but a normal enough one, giving you plot and a setting that you can understand. Even Serial Experiments Lain starts out looking and feeling more like an ‘ordinary’ mystery. These shows wanted to entertain you, and used some basic genre expectations to bait their hooks and draw unsuspecting viewers into the descent into madness that would be coming. Boogiepop Phantom, another extremely obtuse show from the early 2000s, was to an extent the same way: In the first episode, it told a story – one that both began and ended, but that you could follow. It’s how the show continued from there that made it deliberately difficult to follow. These shows do this because they like you. They like their viewers and want to have viewers.
Texhnolyze is different. Texhnolyze hates you. And, moreover, Texhnolyze wants you to know it hates you. It wants you to struggle, and to extract what enjoyment you can from bitter struggle with the material, both in terms of its ideas and its presentation.
Now, on one hand, I’ve enjoyed a number of games like that, but when it comes to non-interactive scripted media, I think the calculations shift somewhat, and the plain hostility of something like Texhnolyze can become a huge problem.
There is a subset of people, especially creative people, who believe that art is superior if it is impenetrable, that something being difficult to understand, that “filters” the masses of possible viewers, is better and smarter than something that’s accessible. To these people, the greatest art is that which can only be comprehended, much less enjoyed, by a select few individuals who, in their comprehension, prove themselves the chosen ones, such that the art that they share between their number becomes the mark of their primacy over the unwashed masses who “just don’t get it”.
Personally, I’ve always despised that viewpoint. At best, the accessibility of art is skew to its quality. The products of a poorly-trained AI, lacking in all rules of form and composition, are certainly not conventional beauty to be enjoyed by all. They’re incomprehensible… but that’s because they’re the product of a glitching algorithm and not a sapient mind, because there is no signal to extract from the noise and any impression you have to the contrary is the known glitch in the human brain where we habitually assign meaning and find patterns where there are none. Such things could be interesting for a time to poke at, but I wouldn’t consider them high art, and whether you even consider them any kind of art is a question that’s fair to ask. On the other side, one normally finds the works of Shakespeare highly respected, and Shakespeare transparently wrote for a broad audience. Part of why his plays are so enduring is that they were constructed to be enjoyable to commoners and kings alike. We might think them dense now, because the language is somewhat archaic and bits of context for moments have been lost from the public vernacular even if not scholarly circles in the centuries between when they were written and now, but most of them were a different age’s mass-media crowd-pleasers, even if they were also intelligent and artful.
More immediately to talking about Texhnolyze, you can see in other anime that being enjoyable and telling a story don’t have to be at war with creating something that’s intelligent, thought-provoking, deep, complex, and/or artful. Even setting aside masterpieces like Hayao Miyazaki’s films or shows that I’ve rated all the way to A+, you can find examples that both expressed something clever or expressed themselves in a clever way and were entertaining shows in the meantime. Within the cyberpunk genre, Beatless had an excellent study of the relationship between humans and technology – I dare say a better thought-out one than Texhnolyze (which approaches a similar topic with a radically different vision) – but expressed it in the midst of a love story with some decent action that most viewers would (release permitting) be able to follow.
That is not to say that things that are dense and difficult are always worse for it, however. Some media isn’t going to be light and easy, and will demand to be chewed on for a while. Some media will – and should – make you work and make you struggle to an extent. There will be shows that force you to engage deeply and really consider what you’re watching in order to get something out of it. Lain, which I’m just referencing all over this review, is probably the best example but it’s far from the only show that insists on your full attention.
And that’s okay, but there is one very specific caveat: the difficulty has to be in service to something. When you use a technique or tell your story in a way that makes it harder on the viewer, there needs to be a reward for that work, a payoff other than some feeling of pride and accomplishment that “I got through it!”. Telling a story in an unapproachable way just to be unapproachable and acting smug about it isn’t clever, it’s the very definition of pretentious. Telling a story in an unapproachable way because it legitimately exposes more or creates an experience that couldn’t be achieved by going the easy way, on the other hand, is legitimately artistic.
I said earlier that I don’t exactly find Texhnolyze’s opening pretentious, because the “Silent film” style sections do seem to be in service to something, essentially trying to come as close as a TV show can to being a first-person experience. Largely abandoning language allows the viewer to focus on being part of Ichise and his world. On the other hand, I left the door open on the term because I don’t think that Texhnolyze consistently uses its heavy and difficult elements well. Texhnolyze hates you all the time, but only sometimes does it manage to love itself enough to have a worthwhile prize for the viewers who really dig into it. I enjoyed the first episode of Texhnolyze, in which probably less than one word a minute was spoken on average, and those that were served more as background sound effects encoded with a hint of meaning than dialogue. For how the show keeps going… we’ll get there.
For now, it’s back to the early episodes. Another thread follows the head of the mafia group (called the Organo), Onishi. The Organo, and by extension Onishi, seem to be the de facto ruler of the city in which the majority of Texhnolyze takes place, called either Lukuss or Lux depending on your Romanization. Onishi is troubled, however, because things look to be heading towards a gang war with either or both of the Salvation Union (a militant anti-Texhnolyze cult) and/or the Racan (a group with more of a street gang vibe than the “cultured” and wealthy Organo). What’s more, even some of Onishi’s own followers seem to want to throw sparks onto the powder keg.
The situation is made somewhat more complicated by the third plot, in which a man called Yoshii comes from the mysterious surface to visit the city. He first stops in Gabe, a small community outside but connected to the main city, getting some hospitality and meeting its backwater notables.
Yoshii talks a good deal more than the other characters in the show, and has a generally affable demeanor that makes him actually approachable and interesting in the early stretch, also getting us the best explanations we’re going to get for a long time about the setting: The territory we’re mostly concerned with is somewhere deep underground (despite having an artificial day/night cycle that is starkly white-bright in “day” mode and a lot of “open air”, not feeling natural but also not much like a cave), and seldom has any manner of direct congress with the surface. Adding in the accounts we get from Onishi and Doc, we can also get the idea that a substance known as Raffia (important for transplantation and Texhnolyzation) is exported from where it can be found underground to the surface, via a group called The Class, who seem to be culturally surface dwellers, living apart from the ordinary folk of the underground.
Yoshii’s reasons for coming down to the underground are quite mysterious at first, and there are many suggestions that his arrival isn’t something with normal precedence. Everybody in Gabe and who finds out his origins later seems to take it in stride, though, which makes it hard to know whether they’re doing so because it’s not really that weird or because almost everybody in this show seems to exist in states of weird emotional disconnect a good portion of the time.
Before getting lost on another tangent on that, I should relate that, in Gabe, Yoshii encounters “the Seer”, a girl named Ran who supposedly has the power to predict the future. Aside from being the focal figure of Gabe’s government and religion, she makes her living going into the city to sell picked flowers. I don’t know if this is supposed to be a reference to Aeris, but Final Fantasy VII came out in 1997, so it could be. Ran, like most characters, is extremely tight lipped and mostly communicates through long shots where she’s staring at something with what’s usually an impassive expression. She even has a fox mask, just to make her appearances a little weirder and more severed from anyone emoting. Yoshii and Ran ride the train from Gabe to the big city together, and the story picks up in earnest.
Before that, though, I need to take that tangent on the characters in Texhnolyze, because at this point we’ve basically met the most important ones.
One of the ways in which Texhnolyze hates you is that it makes it difficult to form emotional bonds with many of the more major characters. In order to form a bond with a character, you need to understand them at least to some degree, so that you can empathize with their situation. I’ve mentioned many times the problem with flat affect characters being kind of inscrutable, most notably with the lead in Kiznaiver, whose lack of emoting that stems from his lack of pain leads to a lack of understanding how he feels and why he might feel that way, making us strangers to the character’s inner world.
In Texhnolyze, you can kind of understand Onishi. He faces enough material problems and talks about them enough that you kind of get what he’s going through at least some of the time. Yoshii is a veritable ray of sunshine in the early episodes where all the other arcs are pushing the style to the max, but he’s also an enigmatic stranger sort of character. Some incidentals like the leader of the Racan can do some of the time… and then there are Ichise, Doc, and Ran. We are told, later in the show, that Ran doesn’t say much because of her visions, and not wanting to take up the responsibility that her future sight brings. Which, okay, she’s both got an extreme circumstance and is pretty young, that’s fair. But we’re treated to so many held shots of blank stares that are supposed to be pointed or fox-mask closeups that it really would help to have some comprehension of what’s going on upstairs.
Doc is communicative, at least, but she’s weird and messed up in a way that leaves her motives and interests unclear. We do know that she gives Ichise her magnum opus Texhnolyzed limbs, and that this leads to her, say, sexually harassing her unwilling patient, but we don’t really understand her enough to get why she would scoop a random maimed guy off the streets and turn him into her perfect super-cyborg. It’s not for a lack of access to patients: she’s very well off, being both a willing exile from the Class and the personal doctor of Onishi, meaning she doesn’t need to trawl the city’s dregs for somebody to stick limbs on. What she does saves Ichise, but there’s little indication that she’s really in the “saving people” game and similarly next to nothing on why it would be him. Yet it’s not played as happy chance either.
And then there is Ichise. Poor Ichise. He proves after some time that he is actually capable of speech, but he still doesn’t use that ability very often. Not necessarily a bad thing, but Ichise is prone to making decisions that are pretty extreme and that can be flagrantly bad ideas. And if you want to have a character do that, the audience needs to understand them enough to get why they would make their insane decisions, even if we still disagree with them. Because Ichise relies on a lot of stares and grunts, if that, we don’t really comprehend his inner self. We get a couple things that eventually manage to be squeezed out of him, but there are really only two points in a show full of him making bad decisions where you say, as you should, “That’s probably a bad decision, but I get it.”
This really is just a case of the fact that Texhnolyze hates you. You see enough to get that there probably is an answer to the factual questions of these matters, but you certainly don’t get much of an opportunity to create an emotional connection with the guy who is essentially the main character.
So, Yoshii comes to the city at a time of great tension. He meets up with the leader of the Racan, Shinji, and continues to be amicable, at least until it turns out that he’s kind of a philosophizing killer. Shortly thereafter we come to understand that Yoshii is deliberately fanning the flames to cause violence between the Union, Racan, and Organo, seemingly just because the idea amuses him, meaning that as affable as he may have seemed, he’s really a complete psycho. One of his former Surface compatriots, now rather worn-out down in the depths, seems to share the audiences horror at what Yoshii is doing once he understands, but also seems unable to stop it.
During this time, Ichise is set upon by Organo goons (the ones he offended in the past, not Onishi’s loyalists) who go literalist on Onishi’s requests not to kill Ichise and throw him in a labyrinthine sewer. In another extended and mostly silent sequence, we see him stumble around the sewers until some of Ran’s flowers, floating in the water, seem to lead him to an exit. You’ll want to remember this, as it results in Ichise being oddly fascinated with Ran in a way that gets treated as the two of them sharing a strong bond, when in fact the only words that properly pass between them are Ran saying that Ichise will some day bring destruction.
Yoshii continues his false-flag terrorism, putting Onishi in a harder and harder spot. This sees Onishi sparring with Shinji and facing the Union, which seems to get the truth of his lack of malice across to the leaders, but not the rank and file. During this, he also picks up Ichise, while Yoshii goes ahead and murders Onishi’s wife, a fact that would be more dramatic if what little human connection he makes (more than the other characters, but still little) wasn’t spent with his assistant and lover instead.
Be that as it may, Yoshii runs out of luck when he tries to assassinate a man meeting with Class representatives. Shinji disrupts him rather than going along with his schemes, Onishi protects the assassination target, and when Yoshii decides to fight Onishi personally and even gets the upper hand, Ichise punches him into next week, where he’s finished off by his old friend from up top. Thus, with Yoshii dead and blamed, further gang war is averted. Onishi’s Organo rivals are also properly fingered for their own acts of terrorism, putting Onishi back in firm control of his organization, just as soon as he gets out of the hospital to take the reins. Ichise, meanwhile, has proven his worth to Onishi (as much as his worth still seems to be spur of the moment insane decisions) and is set to become a made man in the Organo.
With that, we exit the first arc of the show, and Texhnolyze… just sort of spins its wheels for a moment. With Yoshii dead and Onishi’s position secure, the show has lost its main antagonist and much of its direction, and it isn’t particularly interested in establishing or maintaining any sort of momentum. We get treated to some time of Ichise getting used to life in the Organo (including digging into the spontaneously introduced death of his father as a patsy for major crimes – lashing out at the real criminals being one of the two times his bad decisions make sense) before we begin to introduce anything resembling a new plot.
The new plot begins with rumors of people disappearing and ghosts walking the streets. Odd, and not seemingly in keeping with much of the themes of the show. I will come out and say that at least Texhnolyze isn’t so insulting as to go flagrantly supernatural at the halfway point with no warning. I suppose we’ve had Ran the whole time, but that’s something of a different matter.
In any case, individuals are going missing from the Union, Racan and Organo alike, while it seems like the people of Gabe are stockpiling enough weapons to start an all-out war. Doc is rejected by the Class when she tries to take Ichise to them, and then a new force emerges in the city. This force is Kano, a young man from the Class who has decided, arbitrarily and on what other Class individuals seem to regard as more of a childish whim than anything, to take over the city. To do this, he has his own personal army, the Shapes. The Shapes are first introduced as seemingly humanoid robots, but it soon becomes clear that they are instead extreme Texhnolyzation and the missing persons and defectors – only their heads remain under the face-concealing visors; the rest of their flesh is gone, replaced with the Shapes frame.
As the Shapes begin to overrun the city, they assault all three of the former major powers. The Racan are rendered defunct while individuals keep fighting, the Union is slaughtered making a brave but foolhardy final charge for Kano’s base of operations, and the Organo, under Onishi, go from a city-ruling mafia to a small band of resistance fighters and escortees.
At this point, Onishi splits the party. He sends Doc and Ichise to the Surface, hoping that someone up there will be able to rein in Kano, sends away his secretary/lover so that she’ll be safe, and prepares to lead the resistance as long as he can. It’s already been long enough to annoy Kano at least (as much as we get any understanding of Kano).
The show follows Ichise. At the Surface (Reached by train, with the help of Yoshii’s old friend who turned on him), Texhnolyze takes a somewhat sharp thematic turn. Up until this point, we’d had some philosophical natter from Doc and the Gabe folks, not to mention the Union, but it had very much taken a back seat to more material concerns like terrorism, gang warfare, and now an army of killer cyborgs. Extremely late in the game, the journey to the surface swaps almost entirely to talking philosophy. Dark, miserable, slow-paced philosophy, because Texhnolyze hates you.
As best as one can follow, the Surface folk don’t really care what happens down below because they don’t really care about anything anymore. Humanity on the surface is going extinct, and the only reason given seems to be essentially that everybody is just done with living. The surface dwellers we see are rendered in a very ghostly way, usually with heavy distortion so that the audience doesn’t know if they’re there or not. Both Doc and Yoshii’s friend are ultimately reclaimed by their roles on the surface, acquiescing to the slow death and staying behind, at which point they start to be drawn in the same style as the full-time surface dwellers. Ichise, for some reason, turns Doc down and heads back to the city. I guess he has unfinished business in the form of Onishi and Ran, but because Texhnolyze hates you we don’t really understand his reasons. Or Doc’s for staying, that matter, when she seems like a bad fit for the willfully dying world.
Ichise makes his way back down to find that everything is awful. Most of the lights that kept up the day-night cycle are out because the maintenance crews are dead. Shinji stages an assault on the Class and kills a lot of them before getting taken out by one of Kano’s agents, who also kills himself. Onishi meets up with his nice secretary, who’s been raped and brutalized so much that she begs him for death and that he grants her wish. Ran is said to be preaching still, but the eerie empty streets are something else.
At the obelisk at the center of the city, we have a confrontation. Onishi, who has always claimed to hear the “voice of the city” speaks to it, and we see Ran’s image in the obelisk, ultimately saying he needs to kill her for anything to move forward. Onishi runs the obelisk through with his sword, but a pack of madmen set upon him as he does. The mob kills him (very emphatically) before Ichise can intervene, and Ichise then beats them to death, the seeming malfunction of Texhnolyzed limbs not really slowing him down.
Ichise then wanders the streets, now absolutely still and silent, and we see the Shapes. They’ve become immobile, their feet turning into roots attached to the ground. One of them, his face revealed as a defector from the Organo, says they’ll return to the earth, babbling nonsense about eventual rebirth.
Ichise then just walks into Kano’s base, seeing as all the Shapes are doing their best dead tree impressions. Kano says hello, and shows off that he has Ran – or, at least, Ran’s head, the girl herself having gone braindead “by her own will” (probably something to do with that conversation with Onishi). Kano declares himself the last sane human and says everything will be meaningless if Ichise kills him. Ichise punches his head off. This is the second time Ichise’s outburst seems justified from the perspective of the audience.
Ichise takes Ran’s body, performs funerary actions at a glowing rift near Gabe we saw once before, and then slumps down among some iron girders overlooking the darkened city, a hologram of one of Ran’s flowers giving him a little solace as he too slips off into death and darkness.
Thus, with mankind presumably extinct, Texhnolyze ends. The main takeaway? Texhnolyze hates you.
In the interests of this being a fairer review, a little parsing of all the stuff that’s supposed to sound important in this ending: we get a lot of words about “Evolving” or failing to evolve, and humanity needing to become something new in order to survive. This is hardly a unique message, but Texhnolyze runs it a bit odd when you think of how literally it’s taken, what with the cyborgs being the main way. I’m not sure how giving people robot limbs was supposed to free us from conflict or insanity, but there you go. The show talks a good deal about fate as well, but doesn’t ultimately say anything of substance about it. We hear that Ran doesn’t want to do her duties as Seer because what she sees comes true, suggesting that this reality is deterministic. But if that were true, Ran would have no reason to shirk her role except, I guess, for possibly having seen it. The people of Gabe blindly obey their oracle in all things, even to death, and exist solely in accordance with her visions.
Kano is also amazingly thinly sketched. We get a background for him – he received a leg transplant in his youth – Onishi’s flesh and blood legs. However, but the time we meet him now, he’s ditched them for Texhnolyzed. He hints at having a rivalry with Onishi anyway, but never follows through with it. Before the surface arc, he seems to be an almighty spoiled brat playing dictator, which was neither new nor special but made sense. In the one scene he really has after, confronting Ichise, he talks about the future and being the only sane man, but he doesn’t have the time to make any sort of cogent argument of it. And really, keeping a little girl’s scientifically mangled body like he does doesn’t make him look very sane. Nor does the abandonment of the Shapes or his goal of rulership for that matter.
Instead, we get this stale nihilism that feels… miserable for the sake of being miserable. I mentioned earlier the “True art is inscrutable” faction, and there’s also something of a “true art is angsty” faction that assumes there is something of higher moral or technical value in a piece that turns out awful than in one that ends happy.
In that case, I think cause and effect are backwards. Something isn’t great because it is sad, it can get away with being sad because it’s great. Sad moments and sad endings can be incredibly powerful, but they aren’t innately so; they require a degree of skill to pull off, so that the audience is trapped in that moment and brought to experience it, rather than than being on the outside, rejecting the moment. At a core level you need to empathize with the feelings of the characters. Because Texhnolyze hates you, it can’t land its tragedy.
I see what they were going for, they want a drop of beauty in a sea of despair, a setup that absolutely can work… but for it to work we would have to understand Ran enough to comprehend her ending. We would have to know her enough to like her. We would have to know Ichise’s inner world enough to like him. We would have to understand Ichise’s bond with Ran, briefly stated in the end run as him finding that she’s always looking out for him, and consider it legitimate in our own feelings. For the destruction of the city to land, further, we’d want to see it as something valuable, personally and not just in abstract as the bastion of mankind that hadn’t given in to death-ennui. It’s an indifferent wretched hive of scum and villainy in which the mob boss, by virtue of being reasonable and actually having people he non-abusively cares about, is the only one who comes off as sane and likeable. In the ending, you do feel for Onishi and his secretary when he has to put her down, in a way you don’t feel for Ran and Ichise who are mission-critical to the ending. You get that Kano is screwed up enough that Ichise punching his block off is… a natural reaction, but little beyond that, about the two themselves.
Texhnolyze is often a show that, though it hates you, wants you to feel something. In summarizing the plot I didn’t even touch on all the fairly extreme scenarios and images that come up in this show. It is drenched in violence, sex, and taboo, from murder and betrayal to a father extorting his son for sex. In a sense, Texhnolyze almost reaches for the Exploitation bracket. I don’t think it ever makes it there, because it’s too determinedly artsy, and because Texhnolyze hates you. An exploitation piece like Magical Girl Spec Ops Asuka may be a nasty piece of work at times but it still likes you and wants to please you, in a way that Texhnolyze doesn’t. I might even go so far as to call Texhnolyze some sort of nega-exploitation piece: all the same extreme themes and imagery with none of the undercurrent of fanservice of any kind.
And, in my mind, the ideas here are somewhat hollow. I do like how the Texhnolyzation itself is handled, making the process of becoming a cyborg more meaningful than just slapping on an automail limb or two, and how the introduction of the Shapes shows that the process is able to go beyond prosthesis or even augmentation to create something that might no longer be properly recognized as human. This invites some really good questions about humanity, identity, self… but Texhnolyze hates you and thus throws away that setup for… I’m not even sure. What I am sure of is that anything Texhnolyze promises in terms of science fiction and transhumanism, ID-0 delivers better.
I guess there’s bits and bobs of anti-war or environmental or just plain “humans are awful” here and there but none of it is consistent and followed through enough to get a clear theme. Ran is over in her corner playing with determinism and fate, Doc talks a good fight about human evolution and synthetic ascension, the Surface is a weird little side trip like one that might be encountered in Ergo Proxy that has its one note issue with meaning and giving up… none of it meshes together.
When you think about it, Ergo Proxy is a very comparable show in some ways. Ergo Proxy also touches on other manias or philosophies, also has several extended sequences that can be difficult to parse and that aren’t reliant on ordinary dialogue and action, and also has an ending that sees a ton of characters, and all of the civilization the characters knew, dead.
But Ergo Proxy knew how to handle and balance those elements. It can get away with seeing all these different scenarios because it’s structured, by the time you see them, as a weird road trip, and the main characters keep their own themes and issues and grow by experiencing the other. It can have those weird psychological sequences because they’re actually saying something. Even the strangest sequences – which are largely not the esoteric ones – have a purpose, a raison d’etre as the show would be fond of saying (seeing as that phrase is probably the cleanest central thread) at least when you look back at them. Ergo Proxy can get away with killing off loads of characters and also civilization because the ending is, despite that, not miserable. We’re invested in the sad deaths like Raul Creed and Monad/Real, because we liked them, or liked someone who liked them, or liked watching them. And we can accept the ruin of everything because it’s emphatically not a dead end. Texhnolyze ends with “Game over, you lose” for everything and everyone in its reality – in Ergo Proxy, at least some of the major characters have made it in some form and the adventure and the history of their world is set to continue. As much as it’s a bittersweet ending at best it’s also an open one.
But, in saying all this… I feel almost like I’m being too hard on Texhnolyze. Sure, Texhnolyze hates you, and it commits several mistakes. It doesn’t have the genius of Serial Experiments Lain or the energy of Ergo Proxy or the ideas of ID-0 or the storytelling of Beatless. But… I don’t hate Texhnolyze back. Its reach exceeded its grasp. It’s not the great show it wanted to be, that it thought it was, but neither is it awful, or even really that bad all things considered.
The nonverbal, visual storytelling that dominates the opening and is relied on heavily throughout is a strong technique, and it’s well executed. I think if you’re any kind of film nerd, you could probably enjoy yourself just watching the first episode and how it establishes everything in this minimalist way. The world is at least realized, and the underground city a distinctive setting. A couple of the characters, namely Yoshii and Onishi, are pretty memorable, especially Yoshii for how well he builds the audience’s trust only to betray it by being an utter psycho under his calm and friendly demeanor.
In the end, I’ll rate Texhnolyze a C-, but I won’t recommend it. Texhnolyze hates you. It gives you a brick wall to struggle against, a violent puzzle without pieces that fit together, and an ending that mocks you for trying. It’s technically competent, but should probably only be viewed by persons with a “film school” sort of interest in the medium or storytelling in general, and not as a positive model of what to do at that. It’s interesting, in an academic sense, but it’s not going to entertain most audiences.