Review of Lazarus

Given this was Shinichiro Watanabe's latest work, after so many amazing things he'd done, I came to this with high expectations. They were all betrayed. Animation: mid. Not terrible, but other than the pretty good battle choreography, I can only say the character designs and backgrounds are pretty generic. Setting: A sci-fi setting in the mid-21st century could've been explored more, but we get almost no notion of how that world is different from ours, how much technology has changed, etc. It looks like '5 minutes into the future' but it tells us it's decades from now. This almost breaks the suspension of disbelief. Characters: The mainparty is like a dollar-store version of the Cowboy Bebop one, with a capoeira-adjacent fighting MC that likes parkour, a waifu, a hacker girl and ok we maybe don't have a Jet Black equivalent. None are very developed, as the anime gives priority to the story and only dedicates roughly one episode to flesh out each character's backstory. That on its own may not be such a big deal, but their interactions are also generic enough that you don't get any notion that these characters could have more than one dimension.

Story: this is to me always the most important part of an anime, and this one has such a terrible script. Without spoiling too much, I will just say the conclusion was anticlimactic, the issues raised by the conflict are not dealt with more than with a few passing remarks, and the episodic stories are bad-to-mid. The hunt for prof Skinner is the overarching plot, but many of the 'clues' are just 'we hacked really hard into the previous clue, that yielded the next one!' without any real deductions or mystery, especially none the audience can follow along.

All in all I gave this a 4/10, though it's hard to disentangle from the disappointment due to my initially high expectations. Maybe if this had been a generic Cloverworks anime or something I would give it a 5, but this is Watanabe ffs.