The Severing Crime Edge

Everyone has his pills, all it takes is just a prescription we end up in total addiction. For Haimura Kiri , his fondness for cutting hair has led him to a series of unexpected events stuffed in a peculiar story.Action evolves around these Killing Goods, that are normal objects that have powerful enchantments placed on them that is said to have been placed there by their first owners. As you have guessed these special properties are a means to power and conflict erupts when you fight to the death for a wish granted through a lowly murder leaving you in the end with some questions andhopes for the future. Ominous soundtracks back up the very well made fighting scenes that keep up the suspense and sometimes induce the owners feelings. Artwork is a pretty impressive work of light and color that create a grand stage for the characters to perform on. Sparing no detail, be it architecture or natural scenery it is really meant to produce an impact on the viewer. Characters are properly made to express their role through a stunning image, take the Hair Queen for example or Haimura under Graylands influence. To my enjoyment all the fighting and suspense really mixed up with the fan service even though it had its own pathetic or odd moments. Personally I believe the feelings of people to be a good template for stories since they can be very powerful and sometimes they exceed the boundaries of human comprehension.

Dansai Bunri no Crime Edge is a rather recent anime based on a manga by Hikagi Tatsuhiko. The anime was handled by Studio Gokumi, a studio I only know from their work on A Channel. They don't really have many works yet since they're a pretty new studio, their first work wasn't even four years ago. This will be the second anime I've seen from them. Let's see how it compares to the first. Our story opens with Kiri, our protagonist, going to the house of a rumoured spirit with long hair because... that's his fetish. I'm not even kidding. He goes because he hasa hair fetish. When he gets there he finds a petite girl roughly his age with hair down to her feet. He decides to stare at her, scissors in hand while breathing heavily. Contrary to common sense or basic survival skills, the girl, Iwai, decides that the best way to handle the situation is to invite him inside. Because in the land of poorly written characters, actions don't need to remotely resemble what anyone with a single functional brain cell would do. It turns out that Iwai has cursed hair that can't be cut. In spite of Kiri trying several pairs of scissors from her drawer. But that's okay because his pair is magical as it was a murder weapon at some point and it can cut her hair. The worst part is that that isn't even the stupidest aspect of this series. That's right, my friends, the idiocy escalates. It turns out that there are lots of people out there with magical murder weapons called authors and if any of them manages to kill Iwai, the “hair queen” they can get any wish they want and escape the spirit of the original murderer that still possesses the weapon. Kiri decides to protect her because she's surprisingly uncreeped out by him. The series from there follows the pair as they try to fend off a bunch of “authors” who either want to kill Iwai or Kiri. There are many problems that plague the narrative. The most obvious being that the premise is really stupid. Even if it was well-executed, which it isn't, it would still be just an absurdly stupid premise. Which might work in a parody but they play it seriously and try to play up the “drama.” Which is terribly written and the romance is cringe worthy to the point where it would fit into a Stephanie Meyer novel. I have nothing positive to say about the story. It starts out as mind-numbingly stupid and only gets worse eventually ending on an expositional onslaught about how much more there is to come. The characters in this are horribly written. Their actions and motivations have no verisimilitude whatsoever. Kiri has a hair cutting fetish and protects Iwai because he's in love with her based on her hair. Iwai is an archetypal damsel in distress who spends her time either fixated on her love interest, crying or yelling for help. Most of the characters are defined entirely by exaggerated fetishes and the rest are just one-dimensional. The best characters are the dogs that appear briefly in two or three scenes. Just because they're the only characters who never do anything grossly stupid or incredibly annoying. To make things even worse, character motivations and actions change quite a bit in this for really flimsy reasons. They really couldn't use actual character reasons since the characters in this have less personality than a half leaf of lettuce so they have to resort to the tired “characters change because the plot says so.” The art is meh. It's not as bad as the rest of the series, but it's nothing special. The character designs are pretty standard. The action sequences tend towards the slow, dragged out and uninteresting. They also mute the colours when things get violent. Having fetishy characters, including a pedophile, running around is fine, but showing blood would just be going too far. (Facepalm) There's really nothing visually interesting about the series. The voice acting is pretty bad. Not because of the cast, I've heard most of them deliver good performances before, but because the characters have nothing to them. And actors can't make something out of nothing. As a result, the performances are pretty flat and the actors frequently just sound dis-interested. The music is okay. The ho-yay factor is a 3/10. There are a couple homo-erotic scenes between two girls. Unfortunately, those girls are twin sisters. So it just ends up being disgusting. What is with creepy terrible writers and adding romantic subtext to relationships between twins? Looking at you too, Bendis. This anime is horrendous. There's really nothing I can recommend it based on. The writing is terrible, the plot is stupid, the characters are bland at best and downright unpleasant at worst. I could only recommend this one to someone I hated and you're all such lovely people that I couldn't do that to you. Final rating 1/10. Next week I'll take a look at 5 centimetres per second. I know, it's not on my request queue, but I'm trying to finish Legend of the Galactic Heroes and it's quite long. Unfortunately, I don't have anymore requests that are short enough to watch in the meantime. Thank you all for being patient with me. This Friday I'll do a little something special for all of you. It's something I've wanted to do for a while and now seems a good time. And no, it's not images of myself in lingerie for Valentine's. I'm sure most of you would not be interested in seeing that anyway.

Dansai Bunri no Crime Edge: What's Your Fetish? What happens when you combine Rapunzel and Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni with a generic moe romantic comedy? You get Dansai Bunri no Crime Edge, one of the most awkward anime series I've seen in quite some time. Awkward and campy are the best ways to describe it since trying to put this series into one genre is a damn near impossibility, on top of the odd elements this series tries to explore. The series revolves around a rather strange junior high student with a hair fetish named Kiri Haimura, a possessor of a pair of scissors known asa Killing Good. These Killing Goods are murder weapons for killers in the past and are passed down to their kin throughout the ages. Kiri isn't the most accepting of his Killing Good, but his opinion quickly changes of it when he encounters a sheltered girl with extremely long hair named Iwai Mushiyanokouji. Upon meeting her, he learns that she is cursed and her hair cannot be cut. She is known as the Hair Queen and that she is the target of a group named Gossip. Since he possesses a pair of scissors with a unique circumstance, he attempts to cut her hair with it...and their adventures begin from there. Overall, I found the strongest aspect of this series was the atmosphere built from the great animation and music. This series did a masterful job of balancing out the comedy, romance, and thriller elements to make for a strangely intriguing series. The "awkwardness" of this series is actually what I thought to be its greatest strength. It's rare to find an anime that tries to blend the genres like Crime Edge attempted, and to some extent, it succeeded. While the atmosphere was fantastic for Crime Edge, it had a lot of flaws. Generally, the characters I thought were good, but underdeveloped. Kiri was an interesting lead as an awkward, but likable protagonist. However, considering his background, I wanted to know more about his back story as well as his relationship with his father. It's a subject that's barely touched upon in the first episode and we don't ever see it again throughout the series. We do see some interactions between Kiri and his grandfather, but it doesn't do much to develop Kiri's character. Unfortunately, Iwai's character suffered the same problem. She is a likable character, but unfortunately her back story is not very well developed even though the series does give some general explanations early on and also later on in the series. Even then, it was still lacking. In my opinion, the relationship development between Kiri and Iwai was extremely awkward, almost seeming as if the director wasn't sure if he should be more aggressive or passive in their development...and in the end, it turns out being just awkward. The supporting cast I found to be okay. I wouldn't say there are a lot of memorable characters, but I will admit there are some that have interesting personality quirks. A few examples include Yamane with her awkwardly serious behavior, Emily's rather bipolar behavior, as well as the intriguing duo of Seigi and Kozakura, an Author with a jaded sense of justice and an Instead on a mission to keep him inline. Don't get me started on Kanae either, a mysterious character with...oddly enough, a lolita complex. While I did think the animation was the strongest aspect of this series, the direction of it was a bit off-putting. There are some anime out there that you can consider ecchi...and then there's Crime Edge...which beats you over the head with a 2x4 of ecchi and fan service. While I don't mind the ecchi at times and found it to work in some instances, it seems like this series went WAY overboard with it. It's one thing to have ecchi with older, high school characters or adults, but it's a completely other thing when a majority of the ecchi is revolving around children that are 14-years-old or younger. There were times I seriously felt dirty for watching this knowing the characters were so young and are being so exposed. Like I said, there were times when the ecchi and fan service worked in the context of the series, but the producers seemed to hammer it in when they didn't need to. I'd even go so far as to call the production staff behind this series downright perverts. As far as the plot and story are concerned, I did find it interesting, or at the very least, interesting enough to hold my attention. However, I felt this series didn't quite do enough to cover the bases in regards to explaining the Murderer's Game. It's explanation is extremely fragmented and round-a-bout. While it's explanation does make sense, it seems very impractical and I found myself groaning at just how stupid Gossip's logic was concerning the Murderer's Game. My general thoughts on this series are...meh, it's okay. This series has an interesting aura about it with a nice blend of lighthearted atmosphere with extremely dark moments. It's animation (when taking the story seriously) is very good and the soundtrack is haunting at times. However, for everything good the atmosphere does with this series, it manages to always seem to take a step back with its horrifically padded fan service and unnecessary ecchi...thus, also resulting in some underdeveloped characters. This is a series that really had me hooked early on and kept me interested throughout, but as the series wore on, so did my patience with the director's antics. This series had the potential to be really good and it turned out being just average. On top of that, it left us on a mini-cliffhanger for a 2nd season. While I wasn't blown away by Crime Edge, I'd be interested in checking out a 2nd season if it does happen. Recommending this series to anyone would be difficult though considering how blended the genres are in this series. If you liked a show like Tasogare Otome x Amnesia or Sankarea, you might enjoy a series like this. Dansai Bunri no Crime Edge, despite its flaws, is a rather unique series. Overall, I'd call it average though. You can certainly do better than this series and you can certainly do worse as well. Still, it's at least worth trying out a few episodes to see if it is your cup of tea.

Blood, gore, violence. Did any of these words attribute to what you read the synopsis or upon first glance of the accompanying image? Well this is what the anime is truly about, not some oversimplified plot where a guy with a hair-cutting fetish protects a girl who has long uncuttable hair. That's just the pretence set by the first episode, and due to this pretence it shatters the actual story of the anime; a murderous life-threatening game of protector vs protectorates or the so-called Gossip. Story. If you watched the first episode, it doesn't do ANY justice to this anime whatsoever. The story is not aboutsome maniac who wants to cut hair to the point where the stupidly ignores reality. No, this story is about how ordinary people who learn about their criminal ancestors get thrown into a game of life-and-death, and the consequences stemming from each decision. But also, it is a story of Romance. Romance is portrayed quite readily throughout the anime, as a soothing position between the violence. The romantic link between the two main characters, strengthens the story's credibility, meaning that the boy with the hair-fetish, isn't protecting a girl out of simple interest of cutting hair, no that's just not credible. Although I'm making a few round-a-bout points, the simple statement is thus. The story is not about what the first episode implies, it's much more than that. And it's so refreshing to see that the main character isn't some push-over chump who gets beaten to a pulp by every villian he encounters; he's actually quite a 'badass.' So for those of you who want to watch a gore anime filled with violence, romance, and fantasy. I invite you to watch this anime. Moving on, the Art in this anime is quite buoyant (cute) in that it seems much more 'kinder' and attempts to reconcile it's very dark themes with a familiarity of simpletonism (gullibility that the world is kind). In that it tries to warm the audience to the very troubling, gore scenes of the anime that nobody would've guessed would become due to the very contradictory first episode. I think this is a small mistake, but in all honesty, it doesn't detract much from the anime much. For example, the main character, who is probably the most 'evil' person in the anime, doesn't appear evil in fact he seems like a wimp more than a brute. But that's just a minor detail. Sound is quite well done in the anime, there are times where I felt my heart skip a beat due the circumstances of the situation, and then I realised, it was the music. The ending and opening seem to be quite well done, but it was quite confusing, for the same reason as above, it seems so melodramatic for seemingly for reason, but made perfect sense as the anime progressed. Kiri-kun, the main character. I liked the fact that he was such a strong protagonist as he started off, but in all honesty, it made no sense why he was so powerful the moment he started fighting, though the anime explains it in terms of 'killing goods' and bloodlust and etc. It didn't all mesh together quite nicely. But it did explain 'kind of' how Kiri was so strong as he started fighting the 'authors' after his precious queen. The characterisation seems to quite strange, in that he was able to so easily move from normal life to killing and bloodshed with no conscience and then ironically in the final episode states that authors have "no sense of life and death." It pricked my sides a bit in that regard, but just another minor detail. On a side note, the narrator at times seems to be quite worthless, and side characters in the anime seem to be almost ephemeral, you only ever see them once. The characterisation of the 'hair queen' seems to be almost impossible, how could a girl who has never had outside contact with the rest of the world, magically blend in to society within hours? And then go on to having a boyfriend, and becoming a popular girl a school. Very incredible. But she was no doubt crucial to the story, I believe the author wanted to show that she was re-integrating into society, but at such a fast rate seems to be impossible. While it did try and show her struggling at times, it didn't seem to be any difficult hurdle; in that it was passed almost instantaneously. Lastly though, Kiri-kun simply becomes another overpowered character such as ichigo in Bleach, while it's awesome to see strong characters, allowing them to actually have wit in fighting situations or overcome difficult fights without giving another power would be much more interesting. So characterisation is very poorly done. Enjoyment, I loved the anime, though I can see its innumerable flaws. It has many, many mistakes which detracted the feel of the anime, and for some scenes it seems like it was entirely useless in explaining the anime's story or revealing the past. So I can say that I really enjoyed the anime, its story, and the romance and to a lesser extent its characters. So the verdict. Due to the impossible characterisation of the characters, as well as the purposeless art details, I would give the anime a 5. But the anime has quite a good story, it had great depth, and had a thorough explanation of everything that occurred in the anime, as in it explained the enemies' powers, whom they got it from, etc. It had great detail and put great effort into putting detail into its story and overall the anime is a 8. If you've read this far, as always, thanks you for reading!