An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Reach Exceeds Grasp – Eden of the East (Plus Movies) Spoiler Review

Sometimes, creators don’t have a full story in mind when they start working on a project: they have the genesis of an idea, a good jumping off point, or even a first act, but not a conclusion. They have interesting questions, but the answers were not prepared ahead of time. Sometimes, we the viewers likely never learn that this was the case, because the later acts came together well enough that it didn’t matter that they were being made up as the story went along. Other times you get situations like many long-running TV shows and at least a few Stephen King novels, where whether the end result is good or not, it’s clear that there was some serious “Fly by the seat of your pants” writing going on.

Along with that, you also get situations like the one I discussed in Occult Academy where there was clearly some desire for a particular moment, and the story becomes contorted in order to reach that moment. This is even more usually a problem, and I refer you to my previous review for a lesson in why and how.

Why do I bring this up? Because Eden of the East is a franchise with an interesting relationship with both these concepts.

The show starts out with (supposed) main character Saki visiting the United States as a tourist. She’s taking a picture of the White House when police start to hassle her, because it’s not like you’ll see a lot of tourists in that place. This is when a naked young man with a gun appears and manages to get both her and himself away, because it’s not like the police would get aggressive about that in any way, shape, or form.

It turns out, though, that said naked loon also has no real memories until just before coming to the rescue. He uses the other thing he had with him, his cell phone, to find his apartment, which contains more guns (home made) and ammo, as well as a selection of fake passports. He also “meets” Juiz, a woman who, via his cell phone, introduces herself as his concierge, and also explains that he had his memories erased. With the identity of (and paperwork for) Akira Takizawa, he ends up returning to Japan on the same flight as Saki (Mostly because she left her passport in the coat she lent him). They get to talking, including Akira bringing up the amnesia thing, and she agrees to help him try to sort things out.

Before they can really do much, Akira is approached by a cop with his own special Juiz-phone, who questions the ignorant Akira about some grand conspiracy/competition surrounding the cell phones and their owners, making you think that this plot is going to be the non-supernatural version of Mirai Nikki complete with this guy, #4 no less, playing the role of Fourth, the troubled cop in said other show about super cell phones. It’s not really an accurate impression, but the pall of Mirai Nikki’s expectations does hang over Eden of the East for quite some time.

Saki and Akira track down his address to an abandoned yet upkept mall. This helps Akira’s memories in an odd fashion – he seems to be able to remember movies, including many there are posters of in the mall theater. He leaves Saki watching one of those movies when Officer “Totally not Fourth” shows up, beats the tar out of him, and takes his Juiz Phone. The phone won’t work for anyone but its proper owner, though, and Akira got the badge off of our cop friend, allowing him to get into contact to arrange a trade back. By the time Akira arrives, though, the cop has been fatally stabbed by his jealous wife. Before the cop finishes dying off, he manages to tell Akira the basic rules of the game: There were twelve phone-holders (Again, erroneously providing a reminder of Mirai Nikki), each granted ten billion Yen (Akira has a little over eight billion left) and Juiz to help them use it. But, if their account bottoms out, the phone holder will be killed. This is what the cop believes happened to him – he squandered his money and the forces that seem to be capable of arranging anything for a price must have arranged his wife’s rage.

Akira takes these words to heart and seeks out another of the phone holders, a genius doctor. Said Doctor initially thinks Akira has come to kill him, but once that notion is dispelled, he drops more proper exposition. The entire game is arranged by someone known as Mr. Outside, and the folks with the Juiz phones (yes, they do have a special name for them, but I refuse to use it in text) are tasked with using their money to save Japan. In addition to being killed (by one of their number who is secretly Mr. Outside’s agent, the Supporter) if they run out of money, they’ll also be killed if they try to escape the game, or if they act against the interest of “saving Japan”. Oh, and if one of the number is successful, the others who didn’t manage will all be killed, meaning there can only be one winner among the twelve and the others are doomed. Again, haven’t heard that one before. Doc is out of money, having used his funds to build an amazing hospital with flawless care for its patients, which wasn’t enough, so he won’t be around for long. What actually happens is that his memories of the game are erased through a mechanism similar to what wiped Akira’s mind, but for quite some time we assume he was killed off, a deed that gives Akira the motivation to punch Mr. Outside.

This is the idea that was at the heart of Eden of the East: Given a vast sum of money and the ability to request literally anything for a price (When Akira is testing Juiz’s limits, she manages to make the Prime Minister say “Uncle” on air in a matter of seconds, for a fairly trivial price at that), what would you do to “save” the nation? All the individuals we see have different strategies, and the show is clearly trying to invite the viewer to ask themselves what their strategy would be.

The problem with this is, and a problem to an extent with the whole show, is that the mission is extremely vague. If you want to save the world (or even a nation) it’s a good idea to know what you’re saving it from. The show essentially taps into vague millennial angst as its threat. There might be a lot of ways in which the world (or Japan) is in trouble or in need of saving, and perhaps trying to answer what “saved” really means is supposed to be part of the scenario, but neither Mr. Outside nor the show ever really give a coherent answer as to what the target actually might be, and that does damage the fiction and investment in the concept.

You can also add into that some general confusion with our character. When Akira is investigating his things, he finds a photograph that seems to implicate him (in a “gleefully committing crimes against humanity” sort of way) in the disappearance of 20,000 NEETs, and possibly some strangely non-fatal terrorist missile attacks. These are some pretty heavy (if oddly dubious) suggestions that Akira may have, before his memory wipe, been some degree of terrible person. The problem is that we know Akira fairly well and fairly shortly, including him being doggedly helpful and selfless, suggesting that either “Evil Akira” is basically dead, or else there’s something wacky going on. If this arc was going to land, and that’s a big if because amnesia plots are very much uphill battles, we would have to see hints in Akira that he might have some darkness within him, even if he’s mostly a decent person right now. Without the ability to actually see what he would be like as someone wicked, it’s hard to really believe that the wicked past has any relevance.

In any case, we’ve been following along with Akira for a while, wasn’t there another main character who was supposed to be contributing to this story? Saki?

Well, she manages to give the title relevance at least – Saki invites Akira to meet her friends, who manage Eden of the East, a website that started out as a recycling program from their university club but that now serves as a hyper-advanced image recognition search engine (and also moonlights as a dating site for at least one arc). In essence, it’s every billion dollar website rolled into one with future tech to boot, except at the stage where it’s the unloved pet project of starry-eyed dreamers in desperate need of the kind of boost that a small share of billions of Yen could provide. Akira manages to win over most of the colorful yet generally useless crew so that they’ll accept his investment as not being a betrayal of their principles. He’s less than charming to one member (albeit something of a member on sabbatical) named Osugi, mostly because Osugi has a poorly-concealed crush on Saki and she’s making eyes at Akira.

Osugi then gets drunk and promptly goes missing, only for his online posts to suggest that he’s been abducted by a serial killer known as the Johnny Hunter, a fearsome individual who supposedly cuts the Johnnies (to use the show’s insistent euphemism for male genitalia) off of men and kills them. The rumors clearly aren’t quite up to snuff, as it’s said the Johnny Hunter has 20,000 victims – presumably the NEETs that Akira disappeared, not to mention the logistical insanity of a serial killer murdering twenty thousand people by hand. I went over the sort of schedule that would take in my review of A Certain Magical Index, with regards to Accelerator, so I’ll spare you a repetition. However, the posts from Osugi’s phone (which he apparently still has access to) indicate that the Johnny Hunter is very real, and someone close to Saki is in grave danger. So, of course, it’s Akira to the rescue.

The pursuit of the Johnny Hunter both leads to Akira discovering that said serial killer must be one of the remaining phone-users, and to Akira taking an amount of punishment normally reserved for Die Hard movies, breaking bones and getting torn up with a motorcycle stunt, throwing out his shoulder battering a door down, and so on. He makes it just in time to come face to face with #11, the Johnny Hunter, a woman named Kuroha.

Oddly enough, they then talk things out in a very amiable way. Kuroha, it turns out, may be a serial killer, but she doesn’t have Osugi – while he was dead drunk he got his phone stolen by her real victim, a man who also happens to be a rapist. Her whole “game” is hunting down rapists, giving the reason that she was herself a victim in the past, murdering them and using Juiz to clean up after, preventing the police (or anyone else, really) from interfering. She doesn’t really have a plan to win Mr. Outside’s game, but in the meantime she’ll keep doing what she’s doing. Akira talks through her issues and commiserates with her about her situation, even offering her some genuine affection if she desires it. A dangerous offer, you might think, but it goes over well except for the part where Akira passes out from his many injuries before anything can happen between them. He comes to returned to the mall with his injuries treated (part courtesy of Saki and part courtesy of Kuroha). Akira’s injuries, despite being fairly serious types in reality, are never really mentioned again, and this whole arc was staggeringly pointless.

On the whole, the “Johnny Hunter” exchange is the point where the show most fails in imitation of Mirai Nikki. The general structure, where the main character does impossible things with the help of their magic cell phone in a way that’s more action-focused than intrigue-focused…doesn’t land. Akira gets beat up in a way that doesn’t stick, while trying to rescue a guy who isn’t in danger from a villain who isn’t actually malicious (at least, depending on your opinions of vigilantes). He gives his account a workout, but he doesn’t really spend dangerous amounts, and he doesn’t learn anything new about the game or really encounter any new pieces. I actually kind of like the scene with Kuroha herself, but what it serves to do is fill space with cool visuals while removing #11 from the board. Since the piece is added to and removed from the game at the same time, nothing has changed compared to the scenario where we never met Kuroha. In Mirai Nikki, there was never a clash between diary holders that was completely pointless; even when they didn’t end with one of the twelve dead and the endgame progressed, something changed in order to actually move the story forward.

And I hate to keep comparing Eden of the East to Mirai Nikki. They have some similar trappings, but Mirai Nikki is a supernatural action show with some psychological horror elements while Eden of the East is an intrigue thriller with mystery and social drama elements, their cores aren’t really comparable. However, it’s clear that Eden of the East was aware of that predecessor in the weirdly specific “Magic cell phone death game” genre, and borrowed a little heavily in its opening acts.

So, now that we’re done with Kuroha (at least until the movies, where the writers realize she needed to be relevant somehow), we can get back on with the actual plot that leads somewhere. Akira tasks his Eden of the East buddies with repairing #4’s broken Juiz phone, and while they’re not initially able to do it, they do suggest a visit to an eccentric shut-in hacker called Underpants (due to being shut in for the last two years on account of losing his only pair of pants) who might be skilled enough to do something about the broken superphone.

Saki, the token loli (and genius programmer) of the group, and Akira go to visit Underpants. At first he won’t open up under any condition, and he demands to be brought a few things from the store to hear them out, sending the girls away. Akira hangs back for a bit, and offers what he knows about the whole Juiz game, of which Underpants had heard some rumors on the net, getting his curiosity. He lets Akira in, tests his abilities, and ultimately starts to take a look at the broken phone for Akira’s requests to have the logs recovered.

Underpants manages his task with economical speed, disassembling #4’s phone, hooking its guts up to his computer, and getting game participant spending logs from before Akira’s memory was wiped, which weren’t included on his own phone. This reveals that the 20,000 NEETs weren’t slaughtered and were instead shipped to Dubai to work – still possibly a jerk move, but far less racking up genocide numbers. The logs also reveal that #10, not Akira, launched the missiles in the previous terrorist attack, and that it was Akira’s spending that ensured the missiles didn’t kill anyone. This summarily disposes of the arc where Akira might have been a villain in the past, not that it ever really landed.

The wrecked phone is left with Underpants to study it more, and when the girls get back they lie and say there was no progress, time to go home. Along the way Akira gets a call from #1, who wants to talk to him, causing him to ditch Saki and the little girl again in order to attend that meeting.

This is kind of one of my big problems with Eden of the East – in theory, Saki is the kind of person who should be our main character: the normal window onto the strange conflict going on between the phone wielders. She may not be one herself, but that doesn’t mean she’s unable to get involved, and she’d hardly be the first character with less agency than their empowered partner to have the more starring role. She’s set up for this too: she starts the show, she’s Akira’s main human contact (in theory) and she does have a ton of screen time. However, pretty much any time anything important happens, Saki gets unceremoniously ditched. She’s never really allowed to contribute to the story outside of hooking Akira up with the Eden website. Even most characters who could be regarded as observer-types manage to be in place for and involved with critical events far more than Saki does. It’s not quite to the point where you could cut her out and nothing would change because it’s not all the time, just at miscellaneous critical moments, but it is close, which is really bad when you’re clearly supposed to feel for the budding relationship between her and Akira.

Anyway, her contribution to the next bit is being graciously allowed to listen in. She calls Akira to ask why she’s been ditched yet again, and is basically told to stay on the line and eavesdrop. #1 show up and drops more exposition, including his research into the identity of Mr. Outside. #1 believes Outside to be dead (since the personage he nailed down would be over 100) and operating through legacy systems. He’s already recruited two other phone-users, #2 and #10, to help him with his ambition: to win the game by replacing Mr. Outside, freeing everyone from the system. The method they’ve struck to do this is to take over Juiz, who is a super-advanced AI rather than a person. Akira, however, is not impressed: he doesn’t much care for #10’s habit of throwing missile-laden tantrums, nor the fact that another, larger missile attack is in the works, so he goes ahead and ditches that trio as well. To be fair, they’d also hit Underpants with a car (he lives) when he left home to try to warn Akira of something, but Akira doesn’t know that.

As Akira finally tries to meet back up with the group, it turns out that not only is a missile attack planned, but the 20,000 NEETs are back, showing up in the mall via container ship from Dubai naked, computer starved, and out for revenge for being made to work in the bloody desert for months. I have to admit, I’d be pretty peeved too. What amounts to an overweight zombie horde proves a distinct menace to the Eden of the East Team (who were visiting), mostly in their mindless pursuit of clothing and consumer electronics, and more directly Akira, who shows up at the mall just in time.

Akira meets up with/rescues Saki and the gang, and prepares to ditch them again (making an announcement to the NEETs to face him on the roof), but Saki decides to physically hold on this time, allowing her to be brought to the finale of the series: With the second missile attack incoming, including at least one being aimed right at him, Akira has no idea how to stop it, but does have an idea of how to get an idea: he tells the NEETs about the attack, grandstanding as the villain behind it so they’ll listen, and challenges them to tell the Eden system how they would stop it. He then instructs Juiz to calculate which of the up to twenty thousand ideas will work and execute that. Proceeding to grandstand some more, ‘shooting’ the missiles out of the air with finger guns as Saki, um, watches.

A chunk of destroyed missile still impacts the mall roof, destroying the merry-go-round where Akira was standing (and where he had a moment with Saki), throwing him and knocking Saki out for a moment. While she’s out, Akira places a request to Juiz, asking to be made King, taking on the burden that no one else seems willing to shoulder (a theme of the show, with Juiz’s sign-off quote always being “Noblesse Oblige”, but not one that really carries through). Juiz accepts this vague request, with the rest of Akira’s money set aside to accomplish it. Saki comes to, but Akira is busy getting his memory wiped again, and in the fugue state he slips his Juiz phone and a note into her pocket before ditching her. Again.

That’s the end of the show and while the climax scene with the missiles is decent, this doesn’t really wrap up a whole lot. I guess you could say it’s a more esoteric ending, all things considered, but clearly the creators didn’t think the show was done yet either, as the story is continued in two movies

The first movie, The King of Eden, starts after a six-month time skip. Akira is still missing, but the apparition of him on the mall roof, spread through the social network side of Eden of the East, has become a cult figure known as “Air King” credited with saving Japan from the missile attack.

However, we’re not in Japan for this movie – Saki is in New York looking for Akira as she believes she’s decrypted the message he left suggesting they should meet at the 9/11 memorial. Oddly enough, she does actually manage the rendezvous. She does her best to remind of him of himself and reconnect, but matters are disrupted by capering, film-obsessed #6 trying to kill Akira several times, which is mostly just padding. While that’s going on, we pursue Akira’s memory some – including his long-lost memories from his first life, regarding his family. He sort of is on the trail of his single mother, having been in New York before, and starts to find evidence that he might be the bastard son of the late and fairly revered former Prime Minister of Japan.

The movie-climax, however, comes with a strike from #1. He’s discovered that each player in the game has their own Juiz, and that the AIs are being kept more or less safe by moving them around on big trucks. He tries to destroy the Juiz trucks belonging to his rivals, particularly Akira, so that he can win the game himself, but in the high-stakes musical chairs game being played with the Juiz trucks, Kuroha ends up sacrificing her own Juiz to shield Akira. I guess this finally gives us a point to the two of them having met that one time, as she believes in his quest. And anyway, she’s still more or less a woman of means even without Juiz, ending the movie by chartering Akira and Saki a flight back to Japan for movie 2.

The second movie, Paradise Lost, picks up right away, on the plane. After some odd intervention, but land and are confronted by the widow of Akira’s maybe-dad, who is none to happy about his presence in the news or in Japan for that matter. Akira manages to give her the slip for the time being, and he and Saki get in touch with the Eden of the East team, hoping to do something about the whole “#1 is taking out rival Juiz units” problem. They find where the truck with Akira’s Juiz should be and should be going and he leaves to go pay it a visit, handing off the search for a woman he believes may be his mother to Saki.

Saki manages to track down the woman using the super search engine again. She doesn’t know if the former prime minister is the father (though it seems likely from the evidence and her nonanswers), but she does believe that Akira is her son who she abandoned. With her mission as accomplished as it’s going to get, Saki becomes weirdly cognizant of the patterns in this show and realizes that if she just calls Akira with the information he’ll probably ditch her again, prompting her to go try to meet in person.

This brings us to what Akira is up to. His team hijacks the trailer with his Juiz, and the one with #1’s as insurance and takes them to the house of his maybe-father’s surviving family (where Saki meets up with him) while a secondary character (one of the Eden of the East members who never really did anything before) finds Mr. Outside. Yeah, he’s still alive: his real name is Ato Saizo (making “outside” something of a wordplay) and he’s both working as a cab driver despite his obviously insane wealth (presumably to meet random people in an unassuming manner) and playing his own game as #12.

The game is shortly up, though, as after some fairly nice conversations with the Prime Minister’s wife Akira decides to make his last move, calling everyone in Japan at once and sending them all one Yen each with a speech that really doesn’t land about what the supposed problem is and how people can fix it. The best I understand it’s about the trouble of younger generations entering the workforce, but it’s couched in some impenetrable spiel about people “not knowing how to receive money”, hence making them all do it as a collective group with the 1 Yen to everybody. I don’t know about the show’s reality, but I’m pretty sure in our world basic greed means that’s not really the issue. In any case, it’s a bit too reminiscent of Elizard’s senile rambling from Index III for comfort.

Well, in any case, Mr. Outside is impressed enough to call the game. He rings all the other remaining phone users (So not dead #4, #5 who is already mind-wiped and out, or #10 who wrecked his phone after #1 backstabbed him and blew up his Juiz), congratulates them on a job well done, declares them all winners, and sends along one of those memory-wipe signals to erase the memory of all the former players other than himself and Akira. He also apparently knows kung-fu as despite being ancient he’s able to bodily evict Mr. Secondary Character from his cab when said individual takes umbrage at this.

Karmic payback is not totally averted though, as #10 (who didn’t get the call) confronts #1 (currently dazed and confused) outside the mansion where Akira is. They manage a mutual kill where #10 shoots #1 (having intended to take out both him and Akira) while #1 runs over #10 with his car. Akira then makes ready to leave when Saki catches him, confesses her feelings… and still gets totally ditched, with the ending narration letting us know that while she has what seems like fairly unfounded faith that she’ll see him again, no one in her circle did.

Saki, take a hint.

As if the ending wasn’t enough of an unsatisfying anticlimax, we also get one final stinger where Akira gets into Outside’s cab. Outside asks a leading question about how he’d save the nation and Akira bops him with a slipper (as an alternative to the oft-stated goal of punching him out, what with both Outside being a zillion years old and him not having actually murdered #5). They have a laugh about him “still pulling that” and agree to discuss what they’re really going to do. Thus ends the last chapter in Eden of the East.

Now, I promised at the start I would address both “Fly by the seat if your pants” writing and forced moments.

For the first, I feel like the writers went in with the question, but started to scramble when they realized that they had to give an answer. Because of this, we get two separate climaxes and three “moments” that all fail to land. For the first, we have Akira taking on the role of a terrorist despite actually being a good person, giving people a shared enemy: he does this in the last episode of the show, and evokes it again at the end of the second movie. This is the play that most makes sense, after a fashion, but it’s also always upstaged by whatever Akira’s latest plan is.

At the end of the show, Akira’s “Solution” is to make the enigmatic request to become King. In my opinion, this is actually the best answer, in that it implies a certain authority but doesn’t spell anything out too much in order to allow the audience to think it over. As an ending for the show, it does work, giving a point to the repetition of “Noblesse Oblige” and opening the door for a lot of imagination. However, because it’s this esoteric answer, the idea of becoming king can’t really hold up to extension. If that was where the entire franchise ended, it would be open-ended, but it wouldn’t be quite as much of a problem as it is when the story continues. In the movies, we have the vague sense that Akira’s Juiz is acting independently in order to “Make him King.” Apparently that involves faking some very convincing evidence (yet apparently not falsifying the results of a DNA test that the Prime Minister’s wife had done) that Akira is the son of an important person. It’s not clear, though, exactly how being part of a political family is going to make a King out of Akira. After all, Japan is kind of a democracy these days; the son of a former leader does not become the absolute authority. If anything, Mr. Outside is more king-like, since with his nigh-infinite wealth and the connections fostered by the Juiz AIs, he can get basically anything done simply by declaring that it should happen. Juiz (and by extension Outside) can rig sporting events, have people killed, control property, manipulate government… he’s not a “King” people see, but frankly it’s that kind of unrestrained power that Akira actually requests. If anything, Juiz should have started manipulating the global markets like MEDUSA in order to grow, rather than spending, Akira’s funds, increasing the degree to which he would be able to manipulate and control the modern world. And even that, while a better realization than the movies provided, would still lose the mystique that made his request ‘work’ as an open ending.

And then there’s the ending in the movies. I already mentioned that Akira’s phone call to all of Japan is rather scatter-brained, or at least poorly communicated. It’s kind of about the rise of NEETdom as the threat (except where Akira was motivating NEETs before), sort of about the culture of money (in a way that seems downright backwards), and sort of about nothing. I think the general reaction would be a collective “That was weird”, but it pleases Mr. Outside so the story gets to be over. I guess the stinger suggests that the cut of Akira’s jib was good enough for Outside to take him on as some sort of apprentice, which I suppose is as good a ‘resolution’ as any, but it’s never good when you’re completely lost regarding the ideas in a show.

Now, as to the matter of forcing things… I said there was an interesting relationship because, to me, it’s unclear exactly what was going on with the ending of the second movie. The idea of a small but broad gesture, sending one Yen to everybody, being the spark that brings about real change isn’t a bad one. There’s a degree of poetry to it, and in a sense the fact that it splits the burden among everyone rather than relying on a single empowered individual and Nobless Oblige makes it an answer to the theme that’s so often said yet so seldom displayed and carried through. So, here’s my question: Did the writers come up with it at the last minute to cover their rears once it became clear that they had no idea where to go with that “King” thing, or did they always have the idea of “send one Yen to everybody” and force their way to it, resulting in a scattered and nonsensical explanation as to why this is supposed to work?

Either way, it’s not very good. Eden of the East kind of decays the longer it goes on. It can’t keep up the drama or tension it had when dealing with #4 or Kuroha, when it was cribbing Mirai Nikki’s notes, and it can’t really answer its ideas. Contrast this with something like Beatless, a show that has lots of ideas about society and actually explores them well and in an interesting manner without ramming a message down your throat.

I feel like the biggest failing of Eden of the East is ultimately that it comes off as hollow, a mass of smoke, mirrors, and millennial angst with very pretty animation that is desperate to make you believe it’s saying something when really it has nothing to say.

For all that, though, how bad is the Eden of the East Franchise? I’m looking at it all as one because it treats itself as not being over until the end of Paradise Lost, so how does it work?

The pacing is wasteful. In all my descriptions, I left out a number of subplots that never really went anywhere. For instance, at the start of the show, Saki was grappling with the fact that she was in love with her big sister’s husband, and is reminded of that constantly because she lives with them and has to pretend to be happy for them when really she wishes it was her. What does this add to the story? Nothing at all, it’s a random irrelevant detail for the character that doesn’t even feel like it slows her interest in Akira. Yeah, she has to warm up to him, but he’s a weird and sketchy guy, that can take time. Those sorts of things are all over the show.

The plot is hollow. It’s set up as this great mystery at first, but most of the discoveries are Akira being told things he should already know in exposition dumps by other characters or “Oh, wait, we have a magic search engine that searches real life”. There are some good investigative movements, but on the whole it feels like they’re not really worth a whole lot

The characters are problems. Saki is decently studied, but ultimately has no agency. The Eden of the East crowd are fairly single-noted more than they should be given the show, and Akira is inconsistent with a poorly-executed amnesia arc. The other Phone-users are a scattered group: Kuroha is decent, but the others tend to be thinly sketched. Even #1, theoretically the main antagonist (given how long we’re allowed to believe Outside is dead) doesn’t have the time or study he needs. We know he wants to win and that he’s highly placed… and that’s about it. It would have been nice to get some theme or philosophy out of him.

The art and animation is… actually really nice. The music, voice acting, and direction is pretty good too. Eden of the East looks nice and sounds nice, at least

As far as overall entertainment… Eden of the East was also surprisingly tolerable. Like a lot of these stories that have a strong starting idea and no follow-up, it does draw you along at first and hold interest. It really starts to sour once you get to the movies, but for the show itself, that’s actually fine.

For these reasons, I rate Eden of the East, including its movie outings, at a conglomerate D. It’s not a show I can like or respect, but all the same it didn’t completely fall apart on continuation or inspection, and was a fairly comfortable watch. I wouldn’t recommend it – not when shows like Beatless and Ergo Proxy exist, but I will say it’s at least harmless.