Mirai Bakka – Platinum End Spoiler Review

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: a dozen individuals are placed in a battle royale, with godhood as the prize…

And presumably you’ve stopped me by now, because that’s Mirai Nikki. It’s one of the best-known anime series ever made, and while it’s not exactly as acclaimed as it is watched, neither am I an outlier for considering it to be… pretty good. Yeah, I’ve reviewed Mirai Nikki already. Which is why it’s positively strange that I find myself here, reviewing Mirai Nikki, now apparently calling itself Platinum End in a vain attempt to disguise that it is, in fact, Mirai Nikki.

All jokes aside, I get it: the deadly battle royale is if not its own genre, at least a common enough sub-genre or theme that there are going to be lots of versions. It’s older than Mirai Nikki, and it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere for better or worse. And some similarities are to be expected. There’s often a supernatural element to these required fights to the death, and when there is the authors usually see fit, for good reason, to put a pretty big carrot out there as well as the stick of “you’re going to be hunted down by the other participants anyway.” Fate Stay/Night used a wish, Mirai Nikki used godhood, and both of those have been repeated.

So why am I being so hard on Platinum End right from the outset?

There are genre siblings, that share a lot of creative DNA. They’re closely related, so they might resemble each other in a lot. Then there are the inbred horrors, the imperfect clones that don’t have anything new or worthwhile, reprocessing the exact same DNA as their parent and attempting to pass off transcription errors and baneful mutations as meaningful difference enough to, presumably, not get sued. Oddly enough some of these have occasionally been able to branch out into broader stories with more worth to them (I can name two Lord of the Rings ripoffs, initiated with total ripoff first books, that managed to do interesting things with their series as it went on), but there’s always a shameful aspect to that degenerate chip off the older block.

Weirdly enough, despite this, Mirai Nikki is not actually the first other work that most people seem to jump to when Platinum End is brought up. Rather, it’s Death Note. There’s a good enough reason for that: Death Note is also famous, even moreso than Mirai Nikki, and the creative minds that produced Death Note are the very same ones that would go ahead and turn out Platinum End.

In a sense, that could make it even more depressing, like watching legendary talent not cough up a scene worth watching in RErideD or Yoko Taro and Jin somehow stagger through their own Mirai Nikki imitator in KamiErabi. You know these people can do good work, so you wonder why that’s not reflected on the screen.

On the other hand, we know these people can do good work, so you can hold out some hope that there will be a redemption, some cheeky save deeper in the material than the surface level making the new one not just the old one in a legally distinct funhouse mirror. And every so often, you might find yourself rewarded in that hope. That is our reason, our incentive, to see Platinum End through to its completion.

And now, on with the show.

We begin rather abruptly with a depressed middle school grad, Mirai, attempting suicide. He jumps, only to be caught by a literal angel, Nasse, who wants to bring him hope and happiness in the form of angel wings to fly anywhere in the world and crimson mystical love arrows that can gain anyone’s adoration.

Despite the feathery wings and Halo, Nasse seems like something of a bad influence, leading Mirai into a confrontation that ends with the death of his aunt by revealing his abusive aunt and uncle were behind the deaths of the rest of his family. Later she tries to egg him on to finish off the Uncle and the rest of that side of the family with white angelic instant death arrows that he also has now, in the process letting slip that he’s one of a baker’s dozen of candidates to become the next God.

So, this makes Nasse our Yuno character, right? She’s weirdly focused on Mirai (as we see she thought only of him even when being tasked to choose a human for the whole new god game) and acts as the voice of the Id, encouraging him to steal, manipulate, and murder.

Well, not quite. While the scenario, of roughly the same number of people having similar powers to each other and competing in a death match for literal godhood, is the same, Platinum End does mix up the roles… a little. Nasse is sort of half Yuno and half Murmur, seeing as she’s a supernatural being subservient to god but putting her thumb on the scales of the game. The other candidates have angels of their own, so the group as a whole is sort of the Murmur role. The other half of Yuno would be Mirai’s childhood friend, Saki. She’s not properly introduced until after a bit of plot movement, but she plays the childhood friend – and thus girlfriend candidate – role all the way. She’s also a God Candidate herself, setting her and Mirai up as the power couple. And, to cut to the chase, Saki is infinitely less psychotic than Yuno, but does still serve as a pinch of extra spice compared to a lead who, familiar to that other show, really just wants to keep his head down and live a normal life if he can.

Interfering with that is the reveal of a candidate going around as a cut-rate Sentai hero, calling himself Metripoliman. He takes out a sleazy comedian Candidate (who only had red arrows and was using them to get laid) and breaks up a bank robbery, announcing himself to the world and making Mirai realize that he’s being hunted.

Thus, Mirai doesn’t have Nasse with him when we introduce Saki properly… or rather, her angel, who was waiting at the entrance of the high school he specifically chose to go to the same one as Saki. She’s right there and pegs him with the Red Arrow right away. So, limitations aside, one can guess what she wants.

Despite this setup they play it very coy. Mirai becomes Saki’s protector (because she doesn’t have wings of her own), and then by one thing or another, the month that the infatuation of the red arrows lasts passes and it’s revealed that his feelings, exaggerated though they were, were pre-existing and genuine. After that, they just act… a little awkward.

And this is one of the bigger faults with Platinum End, where it falls far short of Mirai Nikki. Here we had our main character in what should have been an emotional journey. He meets his crush again after who knows how long (no, seriously, I don’t know if they were separated after his family was murdered or if they’ve been in contact) and is then literally smitten with her. If this had been good material, we probably would have spent some time on it, both with a little more effort setting up Saki, who is only briefly mentioned before she appears, and in seeing the journey of Mirai’s emotions, both real and inflicted.

We could have had a whole arc with a dynamite setup where you know they’re going to work together for now, but can wonder how much of that is Mirai’s own will, and how much is the magic of the Red Arrow. Every time she tells Mirai to do something, you’d have to ask if this is going to be something he’ll resent when he inevitably is released from the arrow’s spell, and every time she hesitates or makes a choice to try to keep him out of danger, you’d wonder if she was doing it because of real feelings she might hold for him or because she doesn’t want to lose his power willy-nilly.

Then, the scene we see, where he’s tied up on the order of Saki’s angel as the time arrives and he’s released from the Red Arrow would be a tense, dramatic moment. We could look back over everything they went through, good and bad, and process along with Mirai what he now feels about his childhood friend and essentially captor. It could still play out the same, with the revelation that he really is a lovesick schoolboy and she did nothing bad enough to lose that, but there would be meat to it.

Instead, we skip that entire time. We get a (theoretically) shocking moment at the start when Saki is introduced shooting Mirai and then… eeh, who cares? Who wants to know what their main character is thinking or feeling? Who gives a damn about the experiences that could or should shape them and their emotions going forward? Who would ever want a glimpse into Saki’s inner world, and what she might be feeling about manipulating someone with whom she at least once had a positive relationship?

Nope, skip it. None of that could possibly be as important as spouting rules about how the grand total of three magical powers that exist in this story operate. I know some exposition must be dropped and I even know it’s often nice to feel like we really understand, but I for one would like to see something with actual feelings and not a besotted fool blushing at a laconic lump and then cut to the part where the fool and the lump can just kind of be allies.

And for that matter, while I’m on Saki… she isn’t a good childhood friend. I love childhood friend characters, but I’m picky; I love them when they’re done well, and actually evoke some kind of strong bond, when either they relate to each other well enough that you can believe they’ve actually known each other for years and years, or where in cases where there’s a break you can understand what they built, what the absence has meant, and see the smoldering embers of potential romance re-ignite in a new scenario.

Saki gives us none of that. Other than being able to cut out the bit where Mirai is under the Arrow because, oh, he already liked her, nothing is done with the fact they supposedly know each other. Mirai doesn’t seem to understand why she seems so sad and miserable (even though every God candidate is stated to be a sad and miserable person before being chosen) and never really relates to Saki like she’s someone that he knows. And Saki talks so little that even though you could read a lot into her stares and pauses, you could also… not.

How interesting would it have been if Saki were a stranger? If Mirai went to school, spotted an angel, and then was magically compelled to fall head-over-heels for a cute girl he’s never met? We’d then see them work together, could question and learn the answer to whether or not she’s a good person, and build a bond with the ticking time bomb that said bond might eventually violently sever itself… or, as Nasse suggested when egging Mirai on to shoot Saki, perhaps a real bond could be built on this weird, mind-controlled foundation? It would be a much more interesting story if we couldn’t 100% trust Saki, if we could fear she was just using our lead while at the same time watching as she sinks her claws in ever deeper and more legitimately, until we question whether or not we want there to be fallout at the end. Rather than just skipping to them working together freely.

Oh, wait, we pretty much have that version. It’s called Mirai Nikki! I’m not going to claim Mirai Nikki is perfect, but it is a pretty high bar on the whole and the highest note in it is almost certainly Yuno. There’s a wonderful episode in that other show where she and our main character are enjoying some downtime, and he starts asking himself why he can’t just go with the flow and let himself fall for her, each time being a little slower to remember the literal skeletons in her ax-murderer closet, until that’s finally just… put out of mind. And I was halfway through writing my rant about Saki and the gutterball of not having a whole “Mirai is charmed” arc when I realized that what I was looking for was more or less in the greater sire that Platinum End is lesser spawn of. When the two shows have so many similar efforts, the marked downgrade isn’t welcome even if it’s different.

And I want to be clear, this is not just me being mad that this isn’t Mirai Nikki. If anything, this should distinct itself from Mirai Nikki somehow. Saki doesn’t have to be actually sinister or crazy like Yuno. She doesn’t have to be a stranger like I was pitching, though if you’re going to make her a childhood friend crush at least indulge in showing us some of that old bond. But she, and the movement of the story she kicked off, did kind of need to be something, rather than the nothing that was delivered. This is me being mad that the storytelling baby is being thrown out with the conceptual bathwater.

And that was more of a digression than I’d hoped. The review must go on.

Meanwhile, Metropoliman is on the move. Having not made progress in his “hunt down and kill the other candidates” plan, he decides to invite them all to a stadium. Saki and Mirai go incognito, while two others show up in their own Sentai suits, and ultimately a bullied little girl reveals herself as a third candidate. Metropoliman axes the Yellow and Blue sentai and holds the little girl at white-arrow-point. When Nasse shows to encourage our leads to not be stupid, he kills the little girl too, evidently uninterested in a 33-day ally.

Wasn’t this guy playing hero of justice for good PR? Oh well. Someone in the stands snaps a photo of Mirai and Saki when they look up at Nasse. This turns out to lead to a gruff older candidate who wants to work with the young pair for the sake of justice despite having no intention of himself becoming God, but has complicated situations of his own… in other words, Fourth.

He’s a fashion designer rather than a cop, and a terminal cancer patient himself rather than his child having a terminal disease, but he’s still a family man, still associated with terminal disease, has the visual design down, and still manages to bring guns and armor to the party despite his nominally different profession, so I’m just going to call him Fourth.

In any case, Fourth teams up with our leads, and not a moment too soon as Metropoliman springs a psycho serial killer girl from prison and empowers her with wings and red arrows (taken from defeated candidates) just to draw out any God candidates who happen to be bleeding heart types. Naturally, this gets back to our leads and Fourth, in which we learn that Mirai is pathologically pacifistic, unable to even conceive of killing even if it’s dear Saki’s life on the line.

This thing kind of worked in PsychoPass because it was the whole idea, and there was an incredible scene when the main character wasn’t able to kill somebody. Here, it’s done as a hypothetical (which scares Mirai) and comes off as him being insane (and knowing it) more than anything else. At least he’s not on the high horse, I will grant them that.

In any case, this seems set up for a potentially impressive cat and mouse game, with a deranged degenerate serial killer running around and Metropoliman lurking in the shadows… and the show cuts to the end when Metropoliman gets bored and sets another incredibly obvious trap by having her take over the top of a tower in broad daylight. Team Hero, or at least Fourth and Mirai, take the bait, but rather than Metropoliman showing up in all his angsty teenager glory, once Fourth faces down the serial killer girl, gun in hand, Metropoliman just sets off explosives on top of the tower, leaving Mirai (who was waiting to snipe Metropoliman with a red arrow) to watch in horror

You know, there’s subverting expectations and then there’s just outright standing up your setups. I get that it’s supposed to come across as Metropoliman always being somehow one step ahead, because he’s basically this show’s Minene except being a 100% antagonistic prick from start to finish rather than having any of her growth and depth, but they skip the cat and mouse game with just a drop of random out of place sexualized violence from the psycho and then they just dispose of her by kaboom. It doesn’t even get Fourth.

They even outright tease us with what could have been. Right before they see the psycho at the tower on the news, Fourth comes in, having gone over both the old case files of her first round as a serial killer and the current events. Sailor uniform in hand, he explains that all the victims were wearing sailor uniforms and were snatched from specific districts in an alternating order, urging the audience to think we’re going to stake out the next district in the sequence and perhaps even use Saki as bait. Nope! One shot confrontation, and somebody set up us the bomb. If Platinum End didn’t take itself deadly, melodramatically serious at all moments, especially this one, it would almost wrap around to being a clever bit of trolling (like the famous moment in Raiders of the Lost Ark), but the show can’t really deliver anything like that and it wouldn’t land paired with the visceral butchery of innocent girls by a depraved maniac even if the show as a whole could pull something in that bracket off.

After a somewhat abortive confrontation when Metropoliman does show up to try to finish the job, we get a little downtime and finally, a mere eight episodes in, some background on Saki, as she takes Mirai to bed, insists the angels not hang around… and then begs him to kill her because she feels guilty over going with the group while he was bullied in middle school. To be fair, she did apparently witness his suicide attempt when trying to find him to apologize, so it’s not an absolutely insane development for the character, but I still feel some groundwork could have been useful. Up until this point, I hadn’t really gotten any sort of picture of who Saki was, other than maybe a little morose because she wasn’t given many lines or smiles, but it does numb the impact to have… not much.

To the show’s credit the scene that follows, convincing Saki she wants to live by giving her the opportunity to just let go, and the change to have her character become much more proactive after, is fairly decent, but again this is badly hurting for just treating an entire month where she had Mirai love-struck under her command as nothing. Like, you think that might figure in to her confession of abuses done? Or how he feels about High School Saki? Dead horse, I know, on with the show.

Actually, before moving forward, half a step back to another little bit that doesn’t work. Over the episodes between the battle at the baseball stadium and the battle at the tower, we find out that Metropoliman has a motive: his beloved little sister is either dead or in a suspended animation that might as well be dead (we see her kind of frozen in carbonite), and he wants the power of God in order to bring her back. Sure, fine. It’s nice for our main antagonist to have some kind of motive explored, even if it is explored extremely briefly and with almost no passion, but there is an issue. Do you recall what it might be?

This is clearly set up to try to make Metropoliman more sympathetic, like look how sweet he’s doing this for familial love. There’s even a moment at the Tower where Mirai demands if, in all his killing, he knows what it’s like to lose a loved one and he says with more earnestness and less mocking than almost any of his other lines that he does. Done well, a motivation like that can go a long way to if not truly forgiving or excusing a ruthless character at least getting them closer to a state where we can empathize with them.

The problem is, not only are Metropoliman’s means overwhelmingly nasty in and after the stadium, with both bad deeds like unleashing a serial killer on innocents just to maybe draw somebody out of hiding and a bad attitude where he constantly calls other people idiots and revels in the carnage he causes… he also, you know, glibly executed a little girl who was no material threat and who was screaming and pleading for her life. I get that she was a candidate so from his perspective of solving this by process of elimination she had to go, but it kind of blocks using “sad little girl” as his supposed saving grace.

I could keep going but if I don’t move this summary along we’ll be here all day.

The next big hero plan is to get Saki involved; if they can cause her angel to promote to the next rank, she’ll be able to have wings as well. There’s no clean and easy route for this, but it’s suggested to be worthwhile to attempt.

This is interrupted by the arrival of another God Candidate, a rejected JoJo character and overwhelming fanboy of Metropoliman.

Having sold himself out to Metropoliman, he kidnaps Fourth’s family and holds them hostage at a location of Metropoliman’s choice. This, naturally, causes Fourth to fly off arbitrarily and Mirai to follow along for another rumble before they’ve had time to do more than admire Saki’s new super suit.

Naturally, both of them walk in to the trap and end up super-speed flying for over a day inside a little mirror box in order to try to outlast the patience of Metropoliman and his minion. Metropoliman goes home, but the minion still watches for any sign that they’re still in the box. That is until Revel promotes to first-rank by learning how to cry for Saki (in a scene that should have been way more emotional than it was), allowing her to gain wings and go Red Arrow the minion.

Why Fourth couldn’t use the combination of super speed and wearing what is explicitly a bomb suit to just Kool-aid Man through the bullet-proof one-way glass, I will never know. They even manage to pierce the glass with a sword being swung by hand later. Do angels just not get to take advantage of basic physics?

Unfortunately, Metropoliman catches wind that his idiot has been converted, so we can get another action scene more than anything else, with a group of controlled and empowered goons. Rather than a 4v4 grand battle, though, Metropoliman decides to act the part of a video game boss and send his quirky miniboss squad into the grinder one idiot at a time. First comes the gun nut. He gets ganged up on in a fight.

Second is the bioweapons femme fatale, who uses a virus that would kill millions to try to blackmail the party into taking lethal injections. Mirai hits the plague bomb with a White Arrow before it goes off to kill the virus inside. Despite everything, Mirai still can’t kill the bio-terrorist, which leads to a standoff that gets Saki’s mind-control target hit with a needle full of “You melt”. But at least he leaves his sword in the miniboss’s chest.

The last miniboss flees, Fourth becomes incapacitated for reason of plot-convenient terminal illness, and it becomes a 1v1 of Mirai with his red arrow (explaining that he won’t kill even Metropoliman because that would cost him his own happiness) and Metropoliman with his white. Saki? She just sort of… watches over Fourth and lets the boys have their duel when really it should be at least two on one. I guess getting wings doesn’t protect you from sloppy writing sidelining the girlfriend character.

Though, really, if you thought the bit at the tower where they were zipping around melee fighting with the arrows was actually kind of cool, prepare to be disappointed. It turns into a turn-based shootout that gives Metropoliman basically an entire episode to talk up his Ayn Rand Strawman vision about making the world beautiful and luxurious by killing everyone poor and/or ugly, occasionally having either Metropoliman or Mirai shoot an arrow and the other swat it away, getting a couple steps closer each time. The minion that fled livestreams this to the world, where we find out that people have a jerk quotient just south of Elfen Lied based on their reactions.

Eventually we get our final staredown where Metropoliman, relying on Mirai being lawful stupid, declares his intent to cheat murderously with the tiniest fig leaf of “rules as written” for a verbal gentleman’s agreement. Mirai, being lawful stupid, falls for it completely, but since he’s the protagonist he exact words a little better, resulting in a grapple. Once the pretense is gone with the revelation that Metropoliman himself has been red arrowed and is thus immune, Saki eventually breaks out of her bystander stupor to rush in and help hold Metropoliman still. This lets us have half an episode of Fourth trying to use his last breath to fire a machine gun, which he does. Trigger pulled, Metropoliman begs for his life and has one final breakdown in extreme slow motion before (or while) being reduced to Swiss cheese.

Good riddance. Even the “minion” from earlier, who was doing the streaming and who was probably the one to have Metropoliman arrowed, celebrates the result. The rest of the episode gives us several dispassionate angel eulogies, lots of shots of the comically mangled body parts of Metropoliman (he looks more like a disassembled gunpla than anything else), and of course the death of Fourth which to the show’s little credit is about as well-delivered as it could be.

By the way, before the battle with Metropoliman’s goons, Saki, Mirai, and Fourth did a little circle of Red Arrows so that they’d be immune to enemy red arrows. Because Saki had already shot Mirai back at the start and Red Arrows are once ever from a particular shooter to a particular target, this means Mirai shoots Saki. So now the shoe is on the other foot, and if you guessed that they do basically nothing with that when it could have been everything, you’d be right. At most it gives Mirai a reason to not listen to anything she says when she tries to love or support him.

Though, really, the big issue is that this is the end of episode 14/24 and Metropoliman is dead. Metropoliman was pretty important to Platinum End, being essentially the one thing that the show had and Mirai Nikki didn’t: a central antagonist. With Metropoliman gone over half but not quite two thirds of the way in, you know that there’s going to still have to be a major hostile arc or two, but you also know that whatever comes after isn’t going to be able to have the kind of time that Metropoliman had and thus is going to struggle to feel nearly as central.

I’ve dissed this show a great deal, and it deserves it, especially for how it avoids actual emotional setups in favor of flat melodrama, with Metropoliman being almost childishly evil and every chance to have downtime basically squandered on explaining gear and power, but the basic dynamic of Mirai versus Metropoliman, at its core, wasn’t a bad rivalry; a devoted pacifist against a ruthless killer, and someone who was humble in both his specialness and his evident mortal cunning against an arrogant egomaniac. Sure, having the hero and the villain be total opposites is about the most basic dynamic you can get, but it works. It’s the same kind of rivalry as The Doctor against Davros or Harry Potter against Voldemort. If it ain’t broke, don’t break it.

How does Platinum End even hope to follow that act? What does it think it can do that’s going to top Metropoliman?

Well, the boss apparent is the little kid, Susumu. But despite having all of Metropoliman’s loot, he’s more intent on breaking the masquerade, and claims to be a fan of “Red”, aka Mirai, so he doesn’t seem like he’d be a final enemy. Shortly thereafter Mirai and Saki are picked up by a government agent who apparently wants to protect them from being made into weapons as the world-wide God Candidate hunt begins. Saki and Mirai help out, adding the world’s most stereotypical emo kid to the heap of known candidates while the cops get another, a vain woman with only red arrows, into custody. With Mirai, Saki, the emo kid, the socialite, and Susumu, that leaves only one unknown god candidate before they can in theory hold a council to elect God – presuming, of course, this isn’t actually a death game as a scene with the angels implied it might be. That last candidate, though, has a Special-Ranked angel and therefore White Arrows.

This guy turns out to be a weird mad scientist. As the other five gather together and decide that the emo kid should be God because he’s the only one who doesn’t care about continuing to live as a human on Earth, the mad scientist decides to ask them for presentations on what they’d do if they became God, via his angel.

Thus we have a school lecture where the five students give their presentations, and then the teacher shows up to monologue about his answer: that humanity has no further need of God and nobody should become one.

The candidates end up divided, with Emo Kid following the professor and Mirai objecting because some religious nutjobs might kill themselves over it. In the breakdown, Susumu is shot dead by a sniper, and the mad scientist takes his loot. He schemes a bit, and learns that Nasse is special among angels, since she can interact with the physical world, something that she doesn’t realize is unprecedented because she also seems weirdly ignorant of all things angel. With God beginning to fade away (ahead of schedule; we started with almost a thousand days and it’s been a few months), he calls for a final showdown.

In the downtime, Saki professes her love to Mirai, presumably done with red arrow time, and they seem like a sort-of-item. The day comes, and the audience is let in on the professor’s scheme: Kill Mirai’s team, and then have himself and emo kid kill each other simultaneously to prevent any candidate from ascending. We’re also let in that this time, Mirai is prepared to use his White Arrow, unlike against Metropoliman. Why? Not clear, maybe because he thinks his own happiness is buggered if he has to become God anyway.

We start the final showdown with everything being taken to a 1v1, and the professor rambling about his determinist viewpoint where no free will exists, followed by revealing that the emo kid is holding Saki hostage. This gets Mirai to stand down, earning us more long-winded talking! After that he continues to use Hostage Saki, this time to convince Mirai to take an arrow to the face. Nasse grabs Mirai and flees with him because, again, she can do that. It gets her demoted to the bottom, though. Only after that does Saki manage to gambit the emo kid into revealing that he doesn’t have the will to kill someone, which means she gets free in time to go rescue Mirai from another white arrow. The others come in with the socialite trying to kill the professor, but Nasse saves him and gets promoted right back to special rank. So really, she was demoted for about ten minutes of screen time.

Being saved also breaks the professor’s will to oppose the rest of the group which, on the spur of the moment turns back to having the suicidal emo kid become God.

Thus, the Emo Kid experiences apotheosis, wiping the show from the memories of everyone except the main characters and, sadly, the audience. Thus all’s well that ends… wait, there’s one more episode. What more do you have to say, show?

Well, we get the professor puttering around with the socialite, trying to do science. Okay. Mirai and Saki get hitched and plan to be happy together. Sweet enough, their chemistry could have been better but in the end it wasn’t the worst.

And, while this is going on, Emo God up in Heaven tries to figure out how this whole God and Heaven thing works, other than gathering reflections of all dead humans for no reason. He comes to the conclusion that it’s pointless since God hasn’t done anything since creating life on earth (at least most of it), and commits suicide as God. This deletes all the Angels, as well as Heaven. And, as a bonus, since unbeknownst to anyone this universe has no ontological inertial all living things on Earth start to disappear too.

Thus, Earth is reduced to a lifeless ball of rock in one of the most visually unimpressive ways ever put to media, simply jump-cutting living matter out of existence. We get one last kiss from the couple, one last off the wall theory from the professor, and it’s done. Our last sequence, I guess, involves some important looking text overlayed on the desolate Earth from space implying that… aliens made God in the hopes that it would make something able to kill them? So now that this has happened their Alien Euthanasia scheme is foiled and they’re done with Earth? They emo about being immortal and the show just… stops. I guess there really is nothing else to do.

I am beginning to regret giving the extinction ending of Texhnolyze a hard time. At least that was, unsatisfying as it may have been, consistent with the themes, and it displayed an attempt to create something that would having meaning or movement. Here in Platinum End, they talk it up a bit but… yeah, everything we followed for the entire show is rubbed out because an emo kid with imperfect understanding of the role of God decided, heck with it, might as well just die to communicate that God is dead.

I’d be more offended by this, because it is a massive slap in the face ending, but frankly the show loved squandering anything resembling potential the whole way through, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. And while I tried to restrict my Mirai Nikki references… yeah, the ending is kind of the botched version of the Mirai Nikki ending, isn’t it? In both cases, the world and timeline we spent the show on go kaput, but in that other show the ending itself is redeemed in its last moments, when it shows us a true conclusion for the main couple. Here… they get to die together? I guess they’re okay with that.

None of that noise, thanks, I’ll stick with Harhui-ism.

I have let my self loose to rant about most of the problems in Platinum End during the summary. It’s a bad habit, but I think it’s a little more digestible that way. As such, I have a limited amount to say here at the end to synthesize the matter.

I will say, I have to adjust my theory: Platinum End is not – I repeat, not – a Mirai Nikki knockoff. It’s not good enough to be Mirai Nikki’s knockoff. It has the same general setup, a freakishly similar yet mishandled ending, and some other kind of directly lifted bits and bobs, but it fails to create an emotional experience at almost any point. Which, when you get down to it, Mirai Nikki was really good at doing. It had some cat and mouse battles of the diary holders (all better than any of the lame confrontations between Mirai and Metropoliman or the Professor, except maybe the one time at the tower where they actually pretended it would be an action scene), but it was more concerned with its melodrama. That doesn’t work for everyone, I know people who find it too overdone, but Platinum End’s underacting and long draggy speeches work for no one I can conceive of.

It’s weird, and not something I expected to say going in, but in a lot of ways this is one of the worst shows I’ve had to review. It has the spite of Texhnolyze without the artistic intelligence that actually managed to get that show a passing grade, but it tries to disguise its hate by delivering it with a very standard presentation. The animation isn’t particularly good, but it looks like a fine show at least. It has the draggy nature of In Another World With My Smartphone, but it doesn’t try to sweeten that pot with much in the way of wish fulfillment. Don’t get me wrong, Smartphone was an awful show, but while I don’t agree or like it in the least, I would understand someone who said they liked it better than I would understand someone who said they liked Platinum End. It’s not Koi Koi 7 or Ex-Arm tier badness, but it’s about as deep as it can go towards that level with pure lameness.

Anyone who has made it this far can probably guess that Platinum End gets a Fail from me. Like RErideD, it’s hard to believe that this came out of talented people. The only thing that seems right about the show is, as I mentioned, that it decides the world is better off forgetting it ever happened.