Your Forma presents as a cyberpunk mystery/thriller, with interesting comparisons to two other cyberpunk mystery/thriller anime outings. Like ID:Invaded, the show features technology that allows investigators to dive into mindscapes in order to find clues and information. Meanwhile, the main character is voiced by the same actress who voiced the main character in Psycho-Pass. Add in humanoid robots with Asimov-style laws that might or might not be functioning properly (a conceit that’s common enough in scifi, but I’ll claim recalls Beatless because I liked Beatless better than Metallic Rouge in the end), and it seems like we’ve got a pretty good recipe.
Thus, we follow international cyber-investigator Echika Hieda and her android partner Harold W. Lucraft, as the latter is called across continents on suspicion of assault and battery. It seems that the victims of the attacks have fingered a member of his robot class, and since there only three – one missing and another sealed in an analysis pod – Harold is the chief suspect.
Echika, with complicated feelings about the whole thing, does her best to keep Harold from being shut down (strongly implied to be equivalent to “executed” more than “put in cold storage able to be woken up just fine”). This is made a stickier situation when a fifth victim emerges. Sure, Harold is cleared, but since it’s his owner and someone with ties to a previous incident the details of which we know not, the international cops kind of want to just rub him out for PR purposes, since it seems like a member of his class is going huts, another may have done so in the past, and that missing one turns up in pieces.
As Harold prepares to turn himself in the next morning, he has a nice dinner with Echika. When she steps outside so he can take a call, though, the culprit attacks and kidnaps her. Harold and the agency get right on it, while Echika herself notices that, face of the robot class or no, her captor is actually a human. She fights back, dislodging the cap that sealed off her telecom implant in the process, which gives the cops the last clue they need to bust in and make a rescue before anything too bad happens.
The tail of the second episode, after the rescue, gives us a mind dive on the culprit (where we find he was a highly skilled researcher and close to the mad scientist who is basically the mother of AI in this setting – someone we checked in with earlier), and a conversation that reveals that Harold, even if with no intent to allow her to come to harm, deliberately used Echika as bait, lending some credence to the culprit’s claim that his kind of AI might be somehow different and dangerous.
This might not sound like a whole lot for two episodes, but I’m going pretty fast here and skipping over a lot of good talking scenes and clue-collecting steps. Nicely, my difficulties getting a bead on the show that forced me to hold off until Episode 2’s release meant that I could basically bring us in with one starter “case” fully resolved. The current episodes end at a pretty neutral point, where we know something external is going to have to happen in order to get the plot moving forward once more.
And so far, the show looks pretty incredible. The brain dives, particularly, are beautiful masses of psychedelic imagery that still manage to read fairly well when we’re getting to the point where we pick up clues, and that sell the chaos and complexity of a human mind. The images of the show’s future (or, technically, alternate universe since we’re in a 2023 with advanced AI robots and augmented reality implants) nicely blends recognizable architecture with futuristic details.