Ho, ho, ho. Well, it’s just about that time of year again. Last year I went easy on myself and had my holiday review of something that was good, wrapping the show up as a present for all of you. This year we’re back to old traditions, as ol’ Krampus has deposited one of the famed worst on my doorstep, and your reward is hearing how I fared with Scared Rider Xechs.
So, a show that’s got this level of infamy can’t come without some sort of preamble. Scared Rider Xechs (the first word is pronounced “Scar-Red”) is a mid 10’s show based on an early 10’s visual novel. Specifically, it’s based on an Otome game with a reverse harem vibe and a technical plot about holding out against intradimensional invaders. And while I’m sure a lot of viewers would be put off by the Otome/Reverse Harem theme, if you go and flip the genders on Muv-Luv you’d still have a powerful story. Of course, it’s a rare to exceptional bad show that presents its horrors in the pitch. Still, is it really that bad, or could this be a case of a poor synch with the audience?
Well, the show gets off to a traditional awkward start. We get some long shots of this broody boy going up to the school rooftop to play his guitar, except with plenty of long shots to show that this school looks like it’s been through a war, what with the holes and the rubble. After he gets mad for reason not announced, we cut to shady government people doing shady government things. Two of them work together with one of those over-the-top two key locks to open up the important sounding device, only for one to be horrified that the other would mess with the important sounding device, the Dirigent. The mastermind lady talks about “them” and the destruction of the world and then shoots her detractor. Why’d you lend her your help unlocking the dang thing, dude?
But enough of that, a girl is running late somewhere! While making her way through town she runs into a cow… and then a scary blazing monster, causing her to run into guitar guy from earlier. Thus, we get our actual introduction. Said monster is a “Substance”, and the guitar guy, Yousuke, a rider. Together, they’re some kind of super sentai, able to transform and presumably kick ass. Except, it’s implied and shortly confirmed that Yousuke is something of a dud, unable to properly transform.
We get back to school, meet the rest of the hero boys, and introduce the idea that the girl Yousuke ran into might be their new teacher, despite being only seventeen. Funny thing is, this girl – Hako – is not the leading lady you’ll see listed or depicted in all the information about the show.
As the Dirigent arrives, so to do the monsters. They’re dubbed Nightfly O’Notes, and despite having seen many settings with many different names for monsters, I think that one might now be the silliest. BETA still wins for forced anagram times, but at least that one sounds good in its most common form. I’m just going to call these things monsters, a moniker as generic as their designs.
Purple, Pink, Blue, and Orange transform and roll out. Yousuke follows on motorcycle despite not being able to help, and finds his way into the transport plane where that Dirigent awaits. It opens up, revealing its contents to be a girl, who Yousuke is ultimately able to transform in order to save.
Thereafter, we introduce our real main girl: Akira Asagi, the sweet everygirl who is somehow a military instructor. Hako is somewhat important (and more under the surface), proving to be in charge of maintenance for the Substances (whatever that means), but Akira is dropped on us without warning or preamble and seemingly without having been part of the introductory madness. Though it’s implied (and shortly confirmed) that she was the girl from the Dirigent pod who came out wanting to die, her persona seems entirely removed from that, and she doesn’t seem to have any knowledge of it. Ah the good a little drop of brainwashing will do.
With her having not enough idea what’s going on, we get some of the basic background, like how the “Substances” are Red World denizens, same as the monsters, who have volunteered to help defend humanity. They didn’t all steal the Gurren Lagann’s design sheet, but they’re at least more creative than their evil counterparts and fairly impossible to frame downtime scenes around. We also see how they fight, with Akira commanding from the flying battleship and our budget Flame Hazes on absurd magic motorcycles.
Also, the boys form a rock band! They say it’s for teamwork, but really there’s an odd bit of music theme in this show. Not only do we put the quirky heroes in a band, but there are some sound-based terms thrown around in their weapons and gear, they transformation sequence involves an audio jack, and there are tuning forks and guitar picks everywhere in the design.
And I have to question… why? We’re kind of at the level of Girl in Twilight, but while it was arbitrary there I at least kind of got that it was Sony product placing like the anime depended on it. What’s Scared Rider Xechs’s excuse?
The funny thing is that they do only go halfway, with the trappings. The enemies aren’t bested with music, they’re bested with violence that’s vaguely music shaped and it just adds another layer of “um, why?” onto the whole show.
I want to contrast this with Takt Op. Destiny. Takt went all the way with the music theme. It was explicitly the nature of the superpowers, and the monsters explicitly were provoked and drawn to the sound of music. Here, I think they wanted the boy band and then decided to scatter musical nonsense throughout the show in order to somehow justify it.
To be fair, it isn’t that distracting but in all honesty? Scared Rider Xechs doesn’t actually give me all that much material. The show has its predictable jank moments, but overall follows extremely standard beats. We get a down-time beach episode. We get a fishy but seemingly well-intentioned Sixth Ranger. The fights aren’t much, but they’re not that focused on either, and the show slips in at least a few unique set pieces, like using a rocket booster on the launch pad to take out a horde of enemies.
Along the way, the show addresses the individual riders… somewhat. It doesn’t just throw everybody a focal episode, and while Hiro (Pink. He’s small.) is the first to get one, it’s clear that Yousuke and Takuto (Blue, and the nominal party leader) are more important than Kazuki (Purple, and an utter goofball) or Yuuji (Orange, actually serious and responsible).
We also get the seemingly required filler, with a Beach Episode and a School Festival episode. The latter, though, actually advances plot as Hako, acting as an agent for the suspicious leader from the disjointed episode one intro, is found out and confronted by Takuto.
This goes less far than it should, but a complete weirdo in a suit made of stars shows up and starts freaking out at the end of the episode, in an explosive manner. This is Grunbach. He’s here to have final boss tier stats, ramble about games and other things the viewer hasn’t been let in on, and be weirdly obsessed with Akira yet unable to distinguish her from Hako at first.
Then we get a ton of story in rapid succession. Grunbach howls about the game being over because the Blue World (Earth) cheated and starts wrecking things. Sixth ranger Hijiri suits up in White, courtesy of the Substance progenitor Epiphone, and takes Grunbach on. Grunbach decides to let earth squirm for a bit and buggers off. In the wake of that, the shady lady from the start, Inspector Okazaki, prepares to put her plan into motion, which involves burning Ryukyu and retrieving Akira (and only Akira) to Tokyo.
The crux of this ends up being Hako. Hako starts freaking out that all her memories seem to be shared with Akira, and when she confronts the director at school, she gets the full story: the Red World could squash humanity like bugs, but Grunbach likes games and so the old director set this one up to have a level playing field rather than just being squashed. The objective? Obtain (through means not specified but later implied to be winning her heart romantically) Akira, the one and only “Golden Goddess”. Hako? She’s just a copy Okazaki made, invalidating the game and damning humanity to extinction. Freaking out, Hako shoots him dead and teams up with Okazaki, helping her goons get Akira.
In Tokyo, Akira manages to friendship speech Hako back to her side, despite Hako having this moment of “I want to kill her so I can be the real one”. This sounds lame, but as friendship speech solves go this is both a good one and the right place to deploy it. Okazaki isn’t impressed and has them both hauled off to their proper places: a cell for Hako and the brainswashing room for Akira. This is about when Grunbach shows in Tokyo.
Thus, we learn Okazaki’s evil plan to win the game: Step one, why she’s only doing this now, was having a fleet of flying superweapon battleships to deal with Grunbach. That works about as well as the viewer would think, only clearing up his faceless mooks and forcing him into a serious business form before the fleet is wiped out. Step two, completely wipe Akira’s mind, because Okazaki thinks that people can only really love themselves and thus that she’ll get credit for a win by having Akira, down to her most basic instincts, love her copy Hako.
Grunbach rains down fury on the city, incidentally stopping the mind wipe, and the Riders show with their own flying battleship to challenge him for real. Yousuke gets some good hits in, and then it’s an all-out brawl. Meanwhile, the damage to the building broke Hako out of her cell, and she goes and rescues Akira from the mind wipe machine. She pistol whips Okazaki into submission to do it rather than just shooting her for no good reason. As the two girls escape, Hako offers to stay behind and take “another route” out, fooling Akira with the oldest lie in the book… but then while she still has her memories maybe she has a moderate case of severe brain damage, as the saying goes. This is when Okazaki catches up. She and Hako have one final confrontation in which Hako gets a kind of nice character scene and they trade seemingly fatal bullets.
Outside, the flying battleship picks up Akira. Shortly thereafter, Takuto is able to immobilize Grunbach, albeit taking brutal hits doing so. However, he can hold the boss there long enough to, at his insistence, have Akira fire the battleship superweapon to wipe them both out.
Thus, crying in grief, Akira goes ahead and fires. Takuto is dead, Grunbach is dead, Hako is dead, Okazaki is dead, the battle is over… and there are still three episodes in the show.
Well, the next episode reveals that Okazaki’s gunshot wound was not as fatal as it appeared. She seems to have schemes still, but we move to focusing on our main characters dealing with their grief over Takuto (and his Substance partner) being killed for a victory that appears temporary. It’s… actually surprisingly strong stuff, with the right sorts of quiet scenes to really make the death land. And while Hako isn’t publicly confirmed dead, Akira clearly suspects a little and is broken up about her being MIA.
There’s actually a really nice scene where Yousuke, on a park bench, is approached by Akira. They talk about their grief and guilt, Yousuke what Takuto (a friend from childhood) meant to him and Akira how she can’t help but feel responsible, having pulled the trigger and all – at the end of which Yousuke is able to cry, which he had been too numb to do before. It’s actually really solid character work. No matter what else this show did or didn’t do, I’d have to give that credit.
Similarly, we get everyone back together by finding a song Takuto wrote for their band, and performing it in what’s another fairly legitimate moment. The whole episode is burned on these movements (with the alarm for crisis sounding only at the very end), and it’s very needed. In fact, a lot of shows need this sort of thing and don’t take a moment to have it.
Thus, our true final boss arrives: Psycho Takuto! Yeah, even with the heavy dwelling on his death, this doesn’t come as that much of a shock: his body wasn’t found, and it’s not like any red world beings other than Grunbach were set up, so having him get blasted to the otherside was a likely outcome. Takuto has one offer: surrender Akira, and the war will be over. Of course, it’s kind of hard to trust that when Akira is the piece that is otherwise important enough to decide the fate of the worlds.
However, before the appointed time, a phantom of Hako appears and abducts Akira to the Red World, where psycho Takuto awaits, ready to kick off the apocalypse supposedly to free Akira from her role. That role being the entity that can regenerate the world – but only one of red or blue, a cause for which she’s died at least five previous times. Takuto offers that she and even the other riders can live on the red world while blue Earth burns for the Nightfly O’Notes. Akira isn’t convinced, and neither is team hero, having come through the invasion portal to duke it out with him.
Thus, we get our episode-long melodramatic final battle, ending as Akira begins to lose hope and the red and blue worlds prepare to literally crash. As she once again seems to consider a final suicide, Yousuke steps in like in episode one, gives her a pep talk, and she makes her choice… regenerating a fused world where humans and weird creatures live side-by-side in an earth-like realm. It’s a world where all six of the boys can get together and perform a concert with their Substance partners watching. A world where only Akira is missing, though the boys seem happy that as a goddess she’s also everything in this new world.
And, with no cheeky reveal of this somehow being averted, the show ends.
It’s perplexing. When I say Xechs is regarded as one of the worst, I’m using aggregates. Some sources would put it among the absolute worst broadcast anime of all time – an illustrious club including the second season of Promised Neverland (which reasonably made folks who liked the first very mad), Shironeko Project Zero Chronicle, and the scum to end all scum, Ex-Arm.
Scared Rider Xechs… isn’t even really bad. It’s not a good show, not particularly. It’s got a janky first half, a second half that can’t stop throwing new curve-balls just a little faster than they can actually be excused, a do-nothing music theme…
And yet, it’s not bad. When you get down to it, the characters work. Hako, Takuto, Akira, and Yousuke are all pretty decently explored, at least by the standards of middle-of-the-road action shows, and the rest of the cast are pretty solid for extras. The action is nothing special, but we get to see at least a few flashy moves in scenarios that are choreographed at least acceptably. The opening and ending episodes are a bit disjointed – the first episode being overly cryptic and the last being overly melodramatic – but the story as a whole isn’t worse than what you’d expect out of any battle school offering. And, for a show that presents from the start as being about the fate of the world, it actually delivers on that. It’s frankly a shock how rare it actually is to solve things. The emotional work throughout is pretty solid. It’s not the best in the business, but it tries more and achieves more than so many other shows I’ve watched that it’s not even funny. And the art? It’s about as bog standard as it gets.
The only real gutterball would arguably be the romance. In that, there really isn’t any. Takuto and Yousuke are interested in Akira, it’s pretty clear, but more effort is put on her bonds with everyone as people than any special specific feelings. Which, given the ending, feels right.
So I have to ask… why? Why is this one so seemingly hated? Why did I crack open this lump of coal and find, if not a diamond, at least an actual present?
My best guess is that it’s because of the source material and optics, and that the kind of viewers who float the scores of trash like In Another World With My Smartphone or Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody weren’t going to be there for a show with a bunch of guys surrounding a central girl rather than the other way around. They didn’t even have to rate it poorly, they just needed to not show up and Xechs appears to sink relative to scores that receive that life support. Even that, though, feels overly cynical.
Maybe viewers might feel like it flubbed the Sentai genre? I’ll be honest, compared to some folks who get all the way into it, Sentai is not my specific wheelhouse, but the fact that we only get one serving of ham from a villain who only pops up at the halfway point is kind of against genre expectations. But I didn’t exactly watch the show expecting it to do a traditional Sentai setup. I guess if you get Sentai fans offended on behalf of the genre you might see some blowback (and you can replace “Sentai” in that sentence with any other genre and it will still be true). At the very least, it didn’t own the topic as well as Shikizakura, which had its own issues.
All the same, I’m grasping at straws.
That said, I don’t want to oversell Scared Rider Xechs. It has some startling moments of competence, most notably episode 10 after we get the drag-out fight in Tokyo. But that’s it, competence. It does something that I would want to see done, rather than taking the lazy road and giving us nothing. I say that four of the characters are reasonably developed, but that’s really that they count as full characters and not the cardboard cutouts to which I am unfortunately accustomed when scraping the bottom of the barrel. Xechs in no way deserves to be placed in the pantheon of bad anime as one of the infernal worst, but it wasn’t going to be winning any awards either.
In the end, I’ll settle on giving Xechs a C. Maybe I’m feeling charitable since I was anticipating this thing was going to hurt me big time, but really it’s inoffensive, oscillating from awkward, to mediocre, to actually kind of legit and back again. The first half is absolutely weaker, with little in the way of action and weirdly less effective character building than what we see when there’s something actually on the line, but the whole thing averages out to, well, average, with very few elements that stray far from the center. Watch it or don’t, I’m not your supervisor, and I will neither recommend Scared Rider Xechs nor recommend against it.
