Chaos;Head is another entry in the vaunted Science Adventure series. These shows aren’t always strictly the best (though they do contain some excellent entries), but in my experience they are typically very fun. These shows delve into concepts grounded in urban legend, psuedoscience, or light science fiction and typically do their best to spin them into emotional character-driven dramas. In the case of Chaos;Head the concept on offer is Subjective Reality – that is, the idea that what’s “real” is not an absolute fact but rather a fact that can be determined by the will of the observer or the consensus of conscious thought.
And with that, some of you will get the review title. Hats off to the ones who know that reference.
So, the show actually begins with a
flash-forward. Amidst ruins, a boy lies injured, and is approached
by a pink-haired girl with a big sword, who kisses him tenderly while
also, it appears, preparing to stab him. We will be spending most of
the show to get back to there.
Cut to the real start with the boy from
the into, Takumi. He’s an asocial nerd of a high school student who
lives in a room converted from a shipping container, and experiences
realistic ‘delusions’, the most persistent one we start with being
his favorite anime character, Siera, appearing to talk to him and
keep him company. As the show goes on it’s clear his status is
something more than just imaginative or even garden variety
schizophrenic, but for now this kind of is what it is. He hears
about a series of murders called the “New Generation” both from a
classmate and a mysterious online friend named Shogun, killings that
seem to have a strange, possibly occult nature.
Soon enough, Takumi walks in on one of
the New Generation incidents, as he discovers a pink-haired
schoolgirl (the one from the opening) covered in blood and driving
strange metal stakes into the crucified body of a man. Takumi, quite
reasonably, flees at warp seven, not realizing that he ended up
carrying off one of the stakes. The next day he feels like he’s
being followed, but his stalker seems to be remarkably non-harmful, a
nerdy investigator girl Yua, who he actually manages to talk to.
However, trouble comes when the pink girl appears in Takumi’s class.
At first, Takumi is horrified.
Naturally, he thinks that she’s there to clean him up as a loose end,
but she doesn’t seem to intend anything of the sort, acting totally
chummy, like she’s always belonged there. And in fact things seem to
back up that she has always belonged there; even as Takumi looks at
her, his reality is revised, adding “Rimi” into his life.
Apparently, they’ve been friends since first year, except for the
fact where we and Takumi both know that she’s a good deal newer than
that. However, the rest of the world seems to agree with Rimi, and
we have to ask: Is the world that crazy? Or is it just Takumi, our
point of view character, who we already know isn’t the most sane?
The natural assumption would be that Takumi somehow forgot his friend
in a fugue, but the show is shot and edited to instead suggest that
Rimi somehow inserted herself into the class, including retroactively
into the memories of its members, especially since Takumi starts to
remember things he shouldn’t know interacting with her. But even if
we take the outside world’s assumption, that it’s Takumi who’s the
problem, we still have what Takumi witnessed at the murder scene.
And for that, there’s evidence: the stake he carried with him… and
surveilence footage from a nearby alley that the police have, showing
him running. In terror, we know, but the cops think they might have
a suspect even if they don’t have a good ID.
The police aren’t the only ones homing
in on Takumi either. Yua, it turns out, is looking into the New
Generation Murders herself, and believes that Takumi is both
connected to them and somehow precognative, the reason being that he
received pictures of the staking before witnessing it in action. Of
course, Takumi received those images from Shogun. Yua isn’t fazed,
however, she suspects that “Shogun” is just Takumi living
something of an online double life, and she seems to have evidence
from chat logs.
She then just sort of leaves. She
seems more interested in the weirdness of it all than actually out
for any sort of “justice” or what have you. After Takumi does
the first sensible thing in the show and visits his psychologist
(Complaining of sleepwalking rather than hallucinations, but okay),
his friend takes him to a concert where the lead singer is a girl who
goes by FES on stage. Takumi sees, or imagines he sees, her
attention locked onto him, and has a vivid hallucination of her with
a massive glowing sword, and also that she says something with a
strange resonance. Later, on the street, he sees a different girl
with a similar sword that no one else seems to react to.
After these weird encounters and a
brush with the police, Takumi gets a chance to talk to FES (real
name: Ayase), who it turns out goes to his school. She tells him
that he needs a Di-Sword, which the audience can presume is the weird
magic glow sword that we’ve been seeing around, but Takumi is a
little slow and tracks it down as something he can buy, ending up
with a cruddy “Di-Sword” that’s a fragile prop that gets broken
in short order. Oops. Wandering in a daze, he enters a state
between reality and dreaming where he meets Shogun, who appears to be
a withered little man in a wheelchair. Shogun tells him ominous
nonsense before Rimi (with whom Takumi has been getting friendly,
against what would be his better judgment) snaps him back to more
conventional reality.
After that, Takumi keeps dodging the
police, but fails to dodge Yua, who is dogged in her belief that
Takumi has multiple personalities, one of which is the killer. On
the run, Takumi meets Ayase again, who shows him the truth of
Di-Swords, pulling hers from a crack she makes in reality itself.
Here, we start to get the answers about the setting. Certain people,
“Gigalomaniacs,” have a special ability to turn their delusions
into actual reality, which we mostly see in the form of conjuring the
Di-Swords themselves, which normals can’t see but which we’re assured
(and eventually see) are able to interact with physical reality.
This will be important, but is
momentarily shoved to the side as Takumi ends up seeing a video of
another New Generation event (which also features the phrase from the
FES concert), and realizes from the angle of the shot that the person
filming must have been in a wheelchair, and is therefore likely
Shogun. Takumi spends some time with Rimi, who seems to want to
deflect him from the whole “Delusions becoming reality” thing,
even as we see one of the other Gigalomaniacs attack someone with her
Di-Sword, destroying some weird backpack. A bizarre earthquake
strikes on cue with a call from Shogun, and to an extent, we step
firmly into what’s sort of the second show.
Up until this point, Chaos;Head is
largely concerned with the New Generation Murders and Shogun as the
possible mastermind, with questions as to what’s real and what’s all
in the head of our clearly not entirely well main character. After
this point, we rapidly transition instead to the second-phase
wheelhouse of the Science Adventure series: global conspiracies using
super-tech to harness the special effect of the show in order to take
over the world. The threads we were following before aren’t exactly
dropped… but the transition is a lot less smooth than it is in the
better Science Adventure shows.
Essentially, the plot now follows up on
the destruction of that backpack. After Ayase jumps from the school
rooftop and is saved by Takumi imagining a flowerbed into existence
to break her fall, he’s contacted by a new Di-Sword wielder, the
telepath Kozue, who is friends with Sena, the harsher-seeming girl
from earlier. The two of them are busy fighting an evil corporation
known as the Nozomi Group, which has made a machine called Noah II
that can use the same power as Gigalomaniacs to “real boot”
objects into existence by manipulating the thoughts of the masses.
The backpack Sena destroyed earlier was a sort of portable terminal,
allowing Noah II to exert its influence. So, essentially, the fight
is on to have this small group of crazy teenagers with the ability to
force their craziness on reality take down Noah II and the Nozomi
Group before the technology is perfected and gives the Nozomi group
total control over the thoughts and reality of the world.
Even when the New Generation stuff does
poke its head into that, it kind of naturally gets sidelined.
Really, other than a couple moments involving Shogun (particularly
Rimi interacting with Shogun, showing that she knows him, and the
twist of the series) it’s mostly just an excuse to give Takumi a hard
time. Team Gigalomaniacs infiltrates Nozomi’s headquarters and finds
what they think is Noah II, there having a battle with the group’s
boss, Norose, who can use delusion powers himself. They defeat him
after Ayase shows up to help and destroy the machine but it turns out
that was nothing more than a decoy and a fake Norose created by Noah
II.
In the aftermath of this, it turns out
that Yua and Rimi have Di-Swords as well (not that we didn’t know
about Rimi from the opening), and that Takumi’s actions in his
childhood may have set off this whole incident, with the repeated
“Who’s eyes are those?” phrase and a mysterious equation
scribbled in a childhood notebook. This renders Sena hostile, but
Rimi saves Takumi’s rear. He decides to visit his childhood home
against Rimi’s warnings, but there’s nothing there – the very
landscape is unfamiliar. Meanwhile, Shogun wheels into his hidden
hospital room, where the patient nameplate says it belongs to Takumi.
And so, in a sense, it does. It turns
out that Takumi is himself a delusion, a projection of the real
Takumi, Shogun, freed from what I believe is not natural age but a
degenerative wasting disease that leaves him with an old, withered
body. If this seems crazy, I think one of the best things that can
be said about the show is that it manages the twist with extreme
grace. There were clues everywhere, and a scenario that was
well-established that made it clear the twist could happen in this
world, what with Yua’s insistence that Takumi was Shogun, the Norose
duplicate, and Rimi’s insertion into everyone’s lives. Honestly, I
half predicted it. I was right in thinking “A character we know is
actually a delusion”, but I was wrong in that while watching I
guessed that was going to be the reveal for Rimi rather than Takumi.
In any case, Norose snags Takumi’s
little sister (who appears to be real, which is part of what makes me
think Shogun is the same age as Takumi, just withered), and Rimi when
she tries to go to the rescue, torturing the former until she awakens
and conjures a Di-sword. Murder and betrayal are deployed, and
Shogun finally arrives to explain the plot to Takumi, how he wrote
out a delusion-realized equation that became the backbone for Noah
II, and that it is his (their) obligation to stop that
reality-breaking childhood scribble from being misused. The
encounter also reveals Rimi’s past, how she and Shogun met in the
hospital and became friends, an experience that makes Takumi (our
Takumi) realize how he really feels, conjure his Di-Sword for real
this time, and charge off to, as Brendan Frasier would put it, kill
the bad guy, rescue the damsel in distress, and save the world.
Shibuya, though, is in chaos caused by Nozomi’s Noah II porters, and
is ultimately struck by a massive earthquake, leaving us wandering
through ruins while using the power of deciding what’s real to fight
bad guys as we reunite with the various girls and charge onward to
Noah II for real this time. Loose ends are tied up at a kind of
breakneck pace, and we make it to the final boss fight.
Which, as a fantasy action fight with a
little scifi sprinkled on top, is pretty decent. There are a lot of
cool powers on offer, and because of the real nature of those powers
you buy genuinely just about anything. Noah II has impressive
defenses and Norose some overwhelming delusions of his own, but in
typical action fashion it’s nothing the powers of love and friendship
can’t handle as Takumi’s bond with Rimi and the support of the other
girls allow him to finish off Nozomi and Noah II alike.
After the fall of Noah II, we return to
the first scene. Rimi is prepared to stab Takumi because maintaining
his existence is draining Shogun, and if he were to die Shogun would
live on at least a few weeks longer. However, returning feelings not
just for Shogun but for this version of Takumi, she can’t bring
herself to do it. Shogun didn’t exactly want her to either, and
passes on happy that he’ll be living on as the healthy Takumi. After
all, his existence is established not just by Shogun’s mind, but by
all the people he’s formed bonds with. Consensus determines that
Takumi to be a real person, while Shogun, the Takumi who hid himself
away to be forgotten, fades into memory. We even seem to heal the
city with delusion powers, and all is well for the time being on this
world line.
There are a lot of ways in which I
really like this show. The ideas are big, and the visuals are great.
One thing I have to praise the production for is the mundane
delusion aspect. Multiple times throughout the show, Takumi will
imagine something happening or a conversation going a certain way
(mostly diving into erotic fantasies with one of the leading ladies
on scene), when that’s not what’s really happening. These aren’t
delusions-made-real, they’re just the crazy steamy daydreams of a
teenage boy. There are visual cues that let you know what parts of a
scene are real (or at least real booted) and what parts aren’t, but
they’re subtle. It’s possible to get drawn into one of Takumi’s
delusions, but even if the girls acting out of character isn’t a big
enough tip, it’s also always possible to see through them.
On the other hand, the plotline is
sloppy. What starts out as a vaguely paranormal murder mystery with
a schizophrenic character where you question what may or may not be
real – like whether Takumi forgot Rimi or she inserted herself into
his life, or whether Shogun is a separate person or an alternate
personality like Yua believes – turns into a very action adventure
setup that wandered straight out of, as my review title refers to,
the Planescape setting of Dungeons and Dragons, which is the home
turf of combat/intrigue stories where what people believe to be true
becomes true. Don’t get me wrong, I love Planescape, but when a
psychological thriller becomes a fairly beat-em-up Planescape
adventure in the last act, I think maybe we took the wrong portal.
I kind of get what the genre shift is trying to accomplish. The Gigalomaniacs control reality with their dreams and fantasies, so of course when they step onto stage, as somewhat to very unbalanced teens, their world is going to start to look more like a Chuuni Urban Fantasy slugfest than it is a slow-paced and high-stakes criminal investigation. That doesn’t, however, mean it plays any better: Steins;Gate was always personal, and Robotics;Notes (when it got into plot) was always grand. By throwing us into one kind of darkness early, and I mean all the way in, and then shifting to another, Chaos;Head tries in the end to have it both ways, and it suffers for that.
All in all, I consider Chaos;Head to be
something of a B- affair. It’s flawed, perhaps deeply flawed, but it
does remain engaging at every individual point despite its lack of
cohesion, and it navigates dealing with some very esoteric concepts
in a very concrete way with enough grace that I think just about
anybody could understand what’s going on, what it means to “Real
boot” or so forth, even if they don’t quite wrap their heads around
the mechanism. I’d give it something along the lines of a lukewarm
recommendation. It’s fine, and I’m glad I’ve seen it, but there are
certainly better shows out there.