Review of Texhnolyze

How to make a pretentious anime: - Introduce a protagonist devoid of personality, rendered as a blank slate with minimal backstory, hollow existence and no purpose in life. Subject them to betrayal, physical mutilation, and an endless barrage of suffering. Make him emotionally numb and only humanize him when he's fueled by rage and desire for vengeance. - Insert an outsider character whose actions instigate a catastrophic, bloody conflict between the city's three rival gang factions, but leave his motivations intentionally and frustratingly vague and unexplained to add an air of contrived mystery to their character. - Never fully explain the story to the audience to create apretense of intellectual depth through obfuscation and ambiguity. Don't be afraid to use this tactic whenever you notice that your story has fundamental shortcomings and lacks substantive content.
- Paint the cityscape in a bleak, lifeless and desolate palette. Portray the city's denizens as lifeless husks suffering from existential dread brought by living in a dystopian, desolated wasteland of a rapidly decaying city.
- Populate the denizens' everyday life with brutal and graphic scenes of violence and crime. Introduce constant conflict between the city's gangs happening in broad daylight to reinforce the oppressive dystopian atmosphere of the city. Show its inhabitants constantly living on edge, resigned to their grim fate.
- Employ as many unconventional avant-garde animation techniques and a disturbing, unsettling soundtrack in a transparent attempt to elevate the show's lacking narrative through artistic production values. Try to elicit an emotional response from your audience through contrived and insincere audiovisual manipulations that act as superficial substitutes for genuine storytelling and character development.
- Employ as much symbolism and abstract imagery as possible, even at the expense of coherent storytelling. Hammer the viewer with an incessant barrage of symbolic scenes to instigate a profound feeling of forced intellectualism. Make the audience feel like the show is deep and profound simply by making it absurdly incoherent and devoid of intended meaning.
- Make the characters deliver ponderously vague monologues on the nature of existence and the human condition. But don't actually offer any unique or insightful perspectives. Instead, regurgitate surface-level cliched existential thoughts that add little substance to the narrative and serve only to artificially inflate the anime's pretense of depth.

Yep. Here we go. That's Texhnolyze for you.
My final rating: 2/10