Jinki: Extend is one of those situations where I’m going to go ahead and spoil the tone of the review right at the start: it’s a deeply flawed show, where we’re mostly going to be looking at the storytelling problems in its construction.
To put it plainly, and get the biggest problem out at the start, Jinki: Extend suffers from cobbling together material that shouldn’t have been assembled the way that the show assembled it. This is a twelve-episode anime, but it follows a convoluted, multi-line story insultingly by jumping between scenarios and points in time with really no rhyme or reason, and in so doing it ends up squandering what good will it did manage to build.
There is a ton of stuff in this show that suffers from this, where a piece wasn’t set up, or never gets a proper resolution, or skips ahead without a proper flow. In a sense, it’s a shame: some of the pieces, particularly the early ones focused on the show’s first of two main characters, have good play to them. But if there’s a good story in Jinki: Extend it’s a story the size of something like Eureka Seven except they’re basically giving us the abridged clip show version. And I’m sorry, but unless you’re turning it into a parody-comedy, “Eureka Seven the Abridged Series” doesn’t sound like a good time.
So, our main characters this time are a pair of teen girls, Aoba and Akao. They don’t know each other, have never met each other, and pretty much don’t exist in the same story until after the halfway point.
Aoba is a young lady who has a hobby of building plastic robot models. She’s on her own after her grandmother, who was her guardian, died, and is then kidnapped/picked up by some strange folks who end up hauling her to a base in Venezuela where they pilot real giant robots in order to fight autonomous ancient giant robots that could threaten the world.
Akao, on the other hand, lives in Japan. She’s brought into the world of giant robots by some strange sketchy people (turns out to be the same non-malicious ones) to pilot a giant robot for them and fight to defend her city. The only problem is (and this is the meat of most of her scenes until the halfway point, many of which probably aren’t even a minute long) she’s a fanatical pacifist who can’t condone fighting or hurting someone, even to save her own life or the lives of others.
For the first half of the show, we mostly follow Aoba, with only some strange cuts to Akao that feel like they’re trailers for another show. We do eventually get from these early Akao bits that she seems to be ahead of Aoba in the timeline, with her scenes taking place some time after Aoba’s, when the situation has changed. However, even understanding that much (and I mean understanding it, not guessing it) takes several episodes.
Also in the Akao timeline, we get some scenes of our villains apparent. There’s a shadowy council of vague threat, where the members all have animal heads, and there’s also a girl with dark hair and purple eyes who looks a little like Aoba and you might think might be some sort of evil future Aoba, but can’t be sure. These evil folks, in one of the show’s other big flaws (if one that might trace back to the whole “not enough time” situation) say nothing of value. They babble about nebulous, threatening-sounding stuff like demons and dark gods and the end of the world, but we’re never actually let in on what any of their crud would mean in any material sense, so it’s a complete gutterball. Say what you want about SEELE or APE or Vingulf, at least I eventually got what they were plotting and why in some sense. Hell, I think I understood more of what the nebulous talking heads in Pilot Candidate were saying than any of the bad guys in Jinki: Extend.
With that out of the way, let’s talk about Aoba’s story.
So, as mentioned, she’s rather unceremoniously scooped up and shanghaied to Venezuela. Once there she tries to escape her “kidnappers”, but gets somewhat distracted geeking out when she sees a real giant robot. Takeru Shirogane would be proud – or possibly jealous, seeing as she ends up (unintentionally) hitching a ride on the giant robot as it flies into combat.
Misunderstandings are soon cleared up, and it turns out that Aoba is here because of her mother Shizuka, who is a terrible person who only wants Aoba under her wing to steal Aoba’s inheritance (or so she tells Aoba). The rest of the personnel seem pretty nice, with the exception of the rough older boy who’s as prickly as he is ultimately well-intentioned, and it also looks like Aoba has what it takes to be a mecha pilot herself, in some hard-to-define way. She’s not faced with that immediately, though, and only starts in on pilot track after another wild ride incident.
Once she decides she wants to be one of the pilots for the big robot, Moribito-2, Aoba makes herself a rival and struggles to overcome her deficiencies, particularly the fact that she’s a shut-in nerd with no stamina. Eventually she manages, and is able to begin piloting the Moribito-2 (with the prickly older boy, Ryouhei, his really nice dad, Genta, having been injured out of half the cockpit).
Side note: Ryouhei’s prickliness comes out in giving Aoba an insulting nickname. Spoken, it’s “Ahobaka”, merging two words for idiot into something that sounds vaguely like her name. The subtitles got with “Aobimbo”, which works as the pun in English but I feel has some really unfortunate connotations that make it come off as significantly more cruel than “Ahobaka”.
Things come to a head, though, when they face not one of the “Ancient Jinki” big robots but a “Man-made Jinki” piloted big robot. Aoba gives a good account of herself, but doesn’t follow through on fighting for keeps when there’s another pilot who would be killed, causing both robots to take a tumble off a cliff.
While getting her bearings in the jungle, Aoba encounters a boy her age, Kouse, and has an actually good little bit of bonding with him before it’s revealed that he’s the enemy pilot, leaving both of them torn up over the fact that they appear to be enemies. Eventually this comes to a head with a conflict in the robots, where Aoba does her best to disable Kouse’s mech before emerging from hers to friendship speech him into submission. He takes to it and they hug it out on top of the disabled big robots, only for Aoba’s mom to take out Kouse via sniper rifle, shooting him right out of her daughter’s arms.
While this was going on, we got two other Aoba-time lines. In one, Old Man Genta confronted a strange masked (or faceless) boy, referred to as Kokusho, in a sword fight. Oddly, this doesn’t lead with the old mentor going the way of Obi-wan at the hands of his wayward former student, as what appears to be Akao steps in front of Kokusho’s attack, which causes him to stop and have a freak out, and allows Genta to pick up and care for Akao.
In the other, we got backstory for Kouse, finding that he lived in what he thought was a loving environment where he learned to pilot mechs. However, the person caring for him was Shizuka, he was really in a sealed chamber under scientific observation, and she was just using him in low treachery.
After shooting Kouse, Shizuka is shown to be in league with Kokusho. She seems to want to break Aoba’s goodness, convincing her to give into the dark side and kill, and she doesn’t even seem to care if she’s the target of Aoba’s hate as long as Aoba hates. This is part of another sort of problem with the show, and is also the end of what we actually see out of Aoba’s time in a sensible manner. We get a couple more cuts back, showing she continued to pilot and hate her mom, but we don’t really know until far later what became of her and don’t really ever understand why.
So, about that issue… the villains seem to belong to an entirely different setting than other elements of Jinki: Extend, and in general the show has a really nasty dissonance between magical talk and sci-fi talk. It’s quite possible to blend the two, but Jinki: Extend lacks the technique to do it.
A good example of this is the case of the Jinki robots and their pilots. The robots are very technical – they require mechanical maintenance, they’re made by mundane humans (in the cases of the piloted ones, which is what matters), and they have analog sorts of controls with pedals and switches and joysticks. It does seem to be attempting to have a “Real Robot” look and feel, more like Muv Luv or Full Metal Panic rather than Gurren Lagann or Neon Genesis Evangelion.
At the same time, the ability to make the Moribito-2 move is treated as special when Aoba exhibits it, even though she just pulled a lever that should have a mechanical movement result with no need for a special factor. In Aoba’s arc, you can kind of write this off, since it’s consistently treated in a “real” fashion and the talk of specialness is just a sort of vague thing so that she gets a chance to do her real training and pilot the mech. Even the super move Aoba does use in her own timeline, called the Phantom, is explained as a factor of pulsing booster rockets to get crazy extra speed, so you can kind of substitute “intuition” as what’s special about Aoba.
In Akao’s time, this talk is much more pronounced. The robots are the same (for the most part; they’ve worked out one-pilot rigs in the time skip, and they ultimately do display more Super Robot powers, if only in the final battle) but there’s now a special name for those who are pilots or have the necessary specialness in order to become pilots: Cognates. If you’re a strong Cognate, you’re good at piloting Jinki, to the point where the outcome of Jinki battles is largely assumed to be a factor not of combat skill or mechanical might but rather of the poorly-defined abilities of the Cognates in the pilot seats. What is a Cognate? How are they different from normal humans? How do their powers enable them to drive mechas with analog interfaces better than just a person could? All this and more will never be explained. We’re just supposed to accept it.
This isn’t Star Wars, where The Force and Force Sensitivity were always germane to the hard-as-cream-cheese science fiction and Force powers were ultimately made understandable as including precognition and telekinesis that make some of the feats done via “The Force” make narrative sense. Cognate-ness is just a blip with no meaning to it, and that messes up both the fantasy aspects (by not exploring them) and the sci-fi mecha aspects (by adding unfit, non-melding fantasy aspects)
And the thing is, the villains are deep, deep into the magical end of things. They’re deeper, I would say, than even the Cognate nonsense, and what they want or why what they want works at all is never explained. You never feel like this actually makes sense. We get motivations that make sense, or at least one for Kokusho, but the outcomes of that motivation is completely out of left field.
To go ahead and cut to the spoilers, here’s the real story of Jinki: Extend – Kokusho was once a boy named Hakuya. Hakuya was under the care of a woman named Akana, and also came to develop romantic love for his mother-figure. However, Akana had some guilt over being the reason why Hakuya was an orphan, which bothered her deeply (how this happened is never made clear). And, importantly, she was in a relationship with Genta (making her the mother of Genta’s prickly mecha-piloting son). Eventually, Hakuya decided that the only thing he could do with this kind of rejection was to kill Genta, his rival in love and mentor in mecha piloting and swordplay. However, Akana threw herself in the way and Hakuya ended up cutting her down instead of Genta, after which he fled. Some time during his spiral towards that, he also took out his frustration on a young and caring Shizuka, raping her and becoming Aoba’s father. After fleeing, Hakuya takes up the Kokusho personality and clones Akana (since he had plenty of her blood spattered over him), creating Akao, who he lost control of as we saw earlier, in showdown with Genta #2.
So far, so good. It’s twisted and links all the characters together in a kind of tortured way, but it basically makes sense: jilted kid goes off his rocker, clones his dead crush, wants vengeance against the rest of the world. Presumably being raped made Shizuka evil, hence why she works with him.
Where it goes absolutely mental is in transitioning from Aoba’s arc to Akao’s. Apparently, somewhere in not being able to just stab Genta and steal a robot (which would make sense), Kokusho’s next plan was… it’s kind of unclear, but it involves sacrificing Shizuka to make a Shizuka-clone named Shiva (who gets to be an instant young adult) and getting Akao to kill Shiva so that Akao will turn supernaturally evil and become half of the devil, and then pitting her against Aoba, who as Shizuka’s daughter is the other half of the devil, so that the survivor will become the herald of some god of darkness and evil and will burn down or remake the world for unknown purposes. Somewhere in there an animal-headed board of evil directors is involved, but they never actually do anything or come into play and are pretty much there for Shiva to gloat about in a couple early scenes.
Shizuka mentions evil gods early in Aoba’s line, when smugly wanting her daughter to fight and kill, but you can kind of assume it’s a metaphor. By the time this stuff comes around for Akao, it’s clear that we’re talking actual demonic possession, souls, and while the only threat we see is a very big robot with very destructive weapons, probably literally evil gods and the like as well. There’s a brief Midichlorian-style backpedal right at the end when the ghosts of Akana and Good Young Shizuka talk to Aoba right at the end, spouting nonsense about how their “evil genes” will be activated in their successors if they give in to darkness, like misdeeds can be biologically inherited, but that only makes things more muddy.
So, how do we get there? We get a few episodes focused on Akao, convincing her to get in the robot. She gets involved in a decent amount of action involving characters who are introduced like we should already know them (and to be fair, some of them we do from Aoba’s arc). At first we have some of those less-than-a-minute cuts, but now the cuts are to Aoba (sparring with Shizuka with neither lead in nor payoff) and the meat is Akao’s story.
Akao is faced with destruction around her, friends being kidnapped or threaten with death, and so on until she finally gets in the robot and powers through the ghost of Akana in her brain that tells her to never fight in order to fight back. Eventually, after she breaks the barrier, Shiva kidnaps her, befriends her, and then sets up a duel between them where Akao does ultimately off Shiva and become possessed.
We finally see where Aoba is in Akao’s time – still in Venezuela, acting as a good guy ace pilot, because apparently her mom never did corrupt her and just sort of dropped off the radar. She’s cleaned up there, and heads to Japan for the endgame. Also, at some point between when we stopped really following Aoba and when we start really following Akao, Kokusho fought Genta a third time and actually killed him. Okay.
For said endgame, Psycho Akao is given an extra-giant giant robot (firmly crossing into Super Robot territory), and while the rest of Team Hero’s also-rans try to help in their robots, only Aoba is a strong enough Cognate to stand up to Akao, even though we have no understanding what a cognate is, what cognate-ness entails, or why it matters. The villains are fine if she kills Akao because then apparently Aoba will be possessed and Omnicidal Evil, with no other strong Cognate left to stop her, but Aoba manages to get the mindspace talk I mentioned earlier at the last second and disables Akao’s mech without harming her.
Being defeated somehow snaps Akao back to her normal self, the girls introduce themselves, and all is well that ends well.
Yeah, it’s over. Kokusho is the unfought, Shizuka was killed off-screen apparently to make a crappy clone who died like a chump, the animal-headed board of ominous doom is never even identified, we’re just sort of allowed to believe that everything is fine – unreasonably fine as we even see Kouse while visiting the hospital, despite me being pretty sure that he died to that sniper shot. In the last shot, Kokusho takes off his mask (which I honestly thought was his new face once we really started going on about demons), implying… I don’t know. It could be meant that he’s going to ground to keep doing evil things, or that the catharsis of the final battle somehow turned him back to good, or it could mean nothing at all. I honestly don’t know, especially since it’s accompanied by “To be Continued” (or rather “To be Extended”) and never was.
And it could have worked. It all could have worked, if it had more space and used that time in order to properly develop its fiction, if it followed its plot line in a reasonable way, and we had some reason to be invested in the conflict at the end. Aoba’s emotional arcs are actually decently well done. We feel for her getting her mecha-legs, becoming a better person, and grappling with her hatred of her evil mother. Akao’s emotional arcs are weaker, since she has a pacifist ghost yelling in her ear, but the setups in her time are moderately engaging when the supernatural stuff isn’t being horribly distracting.
Eureka Seven had fifty episodes to weave its big story about supernatural BS like living mechas, Coralions, and the Limit of Life and end of the world, while also building characters and following military action. It had its flaws, including being possibly too padded, but in terms of the amount of stuff the show is trying to cram into Jinki: Extend, Eureka is the most similar comparison. If we had even half its time, rather than a quarter, this could have been a good show. It should have been twelve episodes of Aoba, ending with a proper climax and transition to the next phase, and then twelve episodes of Akao in a second season, with more setup. We should have seen what team evil was doing. There are some massive deals hinted at, like a “Lost Life Phenomenon” that killed loads of people and is somehow related to Akao, which we could have explored in order to make it feel like Kokusho and his posse (who have no clear motivation) were actually threatening. They could be legitimately in on the whole demons thing, at which point I want to know why or what they hope to achieve through it, or they could be crazy cultists who just want to blow stuff up but I’d want to know that too. At the risk of some obscure references, I like Tevesh Szat and I like Ezekiel Rage, but Kokusho in the show as it is could ambiguously be like either of them and that doesn’t track.
And, if we’re just going to discard Shizuka (the more compelling villain, because of Aoba’s personal stake. She never knows Kokusho is her father.) in favor of Shiva, that should be a big deal, which it could be if it was part of wrapping up Aoba’s story.
It might still have problems as 24 episodes told in chronological order, but it would be a lot less like a recap of a show I hadn’t watched. Apparently, the Manga is more like this: the first version, simply called Jinki, tells Aoba’s story, while Jinki: Extend, the sequel, is pitched as Akao’s. I haven’t read it so I can’t say if it handles the mystical bull any better, but at least it didn’t throw its stories in a blender. I hope.
As it is, though, Jinki: Extend is broken. I wanted so badly to like this show. It had an engaging main character, some decent mecha action, a kind of sinister evil mom… when it was focused on Aoba, it was legitimately strong. But Aoba’s story goes nowhere, and Akao’s comes from nowhere, and the two are just sort of mixed up into this stitched, ungainly hybrid… and I just can’t. I can’t recommend Jinki: Extend. It gets a D+, the grade I give to something that is not good and should not be pursued, but does have bits and pieces to recommend it, even if they aren’t worth enough. Take from that what you will.